79 Iranian Departments in QS World University Rankings by Subject 2023

79 Iranian Departments in QS World University Rankings by Subject 2023

Office of International Scientific Cooperation, Apr. 3, 2023

The QS World University Rankings by Subject 2023 cover a total of 54 disciplines, grouped into five broad subject areas.

The QS World University Rankings by Subject are compiled annually to help prospective students identify the leading universities in a particular subject. Research citations, along with the results of major global surveys of employers and academics, are used to rank universities.

This year’s rankings include three new subjects: data science, history of art, and marketing. 

The recently launched QS World University Rankings by Subject 2023 ranks universities for 54 subjects. It’s the biggest QS ranking yet, featuring more than 15,700 different academic programmes from 1594 institutions – 103 of which are new.

Academic programmes are ranked over five indicators to effectively reflect their performance, taking into account academic reputation, employer reputation and faculty research. 

There are five indicators that determine the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2023:

Academic reputation 

Drawing on responses from over 130,000 academics, respondents are asked to list up to 10 domestic and 30 international institutions which they consider to be excellent for research in the given area. The results of the survey are then filtered according to the narrow area of expertise identified by respondents.

Employer reputation 

The employer reputation indicator draws from the survey responses of more than 75,000 graduate employers worldwide. Employers are asked to identify up to 10 domestic and 30 international institutions they consider excellent for the recruitment of graduates. They are also asked to identify the disciplines from which they prefer to recruit. 

Research citations per paper

All citations data is sourced from Elsevier Scopus. A minimum publication threshold is set for each subject to avoid potential anomalies stemming from small numbers of highly cited papers.

Both the minimum publications threshold and the weighting applied to the citations indicator are adapted in order to best reflect prevalent publication and citation patterns in a given discipline. 

H-index 

The H-index is a way of measuring both the productivity and impact of an academic or department at a university. The index is based on the set of the academic’s most cited papers and the number of citations they have received in other publications. 

International research network (by broad faculty area) 

The IRN Index reflects the ability of institutions to diversify the geography of their international research network by establishing sustainable research partnerships with other higher education institutions. 

In this ranking which has been based on 5 general areas of arts and humanities, engineering and technology, biological and medical sciences, natural sciences, as well as social sciences and management, Iranian universities, as in previous years, were ranked in three areas of engineering and technology, medicine and biological sciences and natural sciences have been ranked among the top universities in the world, the results of which can be seen in the table.

As can be seen in the table below, in engineering and technology 2023 ranking, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran University, Amir Kabir University of Technology and Iran Science and Technology University are present.

Medicine and biological sciences at Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Mashhad University of Medicine, Shiraz University of Medicine and University of Tehran are present.

In natural sciences, we see the presence of University of Tehran and Sharif University of technology, which were able to be present in this ranking.

In this ranking, which is evaluated based on 54 subjects, 16 universities from the Islamic Republic of Iran are present in 19 subject areas, while this was 13 and 15 universities in 2022 and 2021, respectively. The table below shows the universities in the 2023 ranking.