Implementation of a new research indicator to QS ranking system

The QS world university rankings employ six indicators with different weights; namely: academic reputation (40%), Employer reputation (10%), research performance (20% which is basically normalized citations per faculty, Faculty/Student Ratio (20%), International Faculty Ratio (5%) and International Student Ratio (5%). In this ranking system, the research performance is calculated by dividing total normalized citations by the number of full time equivalent faculty. Recently, Abdul-Majeed et al. (2021 proposed a new equation for predicting the research performance of universities, using four variables (number of published papers, number of researchers, total citations, number of non-citesd papers). In the present study, we investigate the influence of using Abdul-Majeed et al. equation on the rank of the top 100 universities of QS ranking. Results have shown that replacing the QS research indicator with that suggested by Abdul-Majeed et al. results in an apparent change in the rank of the 100 universities. The rank of 92 universities has been changed through this new proposal. Furthermore, we modify the Abdul-Majeed et al. equation by including reviewing activity based on information extracted from Publons site. Detailed calculations reveal that most of the top 100 universities have low level of reviewing activity. This modification causes a significant variation (the change reaches 98%) in the rank of the top 100 universities.