The ninth annual U.S. News & World Report Best Global Universities rankings were produced to provide insight into how universities compare globally. Since an increasing number of students plan to enroll in universities outside of their own country, the Best Global Universities rankings – which focus specifically on schools' academic research and reputation overall and not on their separate undergraduate or graduate programs – can help those applicants accurately compare institutions around the world.
The 2022-2023 Best Global Universities rankings also provide insight into how U.S. universities – which U.S. News has been ranking separately for nearly 40 years – stand globally. All universities can benchmark themselves against schools in their own country and region, become more visible on the world stage, and find top schools in other countries to consider collaborating with.
The overall Best Global Universities ranking encompasses 2,000 top institutions, up from 1,750 last year, spread across 95 countries, up from 90 last year. The first step in producing these rankings, which are powered by Clarivate,™ involved creating a pool of 2,011 universities that was used to rank the top 2,000 schools.
To create the pool of 2,011, U.S. News first included the top 250 universities in the results of Carafate's global reputation survey, described further below. Next, U.S. News added any other institutions that met the minimum threshold of at least 1,250 papers published from 2016 to 2020. This paper threshold is unchanged from last year. Those two criteria created the final 2022-2023 ranking pool of 2,011 institutions from which the top-scoring 2,000 universities are ranked by U.S. News in the overall ranking.
As a result of these criteria, many stand-alone graduate schools, including Rockefeller University in New York and the University of California—San Francisco, were eligible to be ranked and were included in the ranking universe.
The second step was to calculate the rankings using the 13 indicators and weights that U.S. News chose to measure global research performance. Each of the school's profile pages on usnews.com lists the overall global score as well as numerical ranks for the 13 indicators, allowing students to compare each school's standing in each indicator.