Personally, I am against the idea of assigning ranking to the universities. I believe all of these ranking systems are influenced by politics and the countries. For example, QS ranking claims to use the number of international students, faculty, publications, student experiences, research environments, and so forth to assign rankings. For the record of publications and research output, QS relies on the data from scopus, web of science, and other international databases. Given that all of these databases have more papers from the US, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and other developed countries; the universities in these countries would obvioulsy be ranked higher. I doubt that these rankings consider the research output of resource poor countries in their local journals. So, essentially economy of a country and the funding devoted to research would affect the ranking. Therefore, I take all of these rankings as a grain of salt. I think the choice of a univeristy is contingent upon several factors such as one's research area, chosen supervisor, financial situation, family commitments, country of residence. Sometimes the supervisors at these highly ranked universities are better at producing papers, but not so much interested in effectively teaching students. Again, it varies from person to person. I am not generalizing this to all the supervisors and mentors out there.

Even though, Times Higher Education has some good parameters, but QS remain the most strongest ranking system that is very close to the actual performance of the universities.

Definitely QS

Best Regards Zakaria Al-Qodah

How about the '"webometric Ranking"' is that out dated ? please verify this for me.

Dear Hasitha Koralage

Thank you for your comment. Actually it is not. It is one of the best ranking webs

Thank you for the Information

Zakaria Al-Qodah

Definitely QS . QS World University Rankings is an annual publication of university rankings by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS).