SCImago Institutions Ranking Methodology

General considerations

The SCImago Institutions Rankings (SIR) is a classification of academic and research-related institutions ranked by a composite indicator that combines three different sets of indicators based on research performance, innovation outputs and societal impact measured by their web visibility.

It provides a friendly interface that allows the visualization of any customized ranking from the combination of these three sets of indicators. Additionally, it is possible to compare the trends for individual indicators of up to six institutions. For each large sector it is also possible to obtain distribution charts of the different indicators.

For comparative purposes, the value of the composite indicator has been set on a scale of 0 to 100. However the line graphs and bar graphs always represent ranks (lower is better, so the highest values are the worst).

Indicators

Indicators are divided into three groups intended to reflect scientific, economic and social characteristics of institutions. The SIR includes both, size-dependent and size-independent indicators; that is indicators influenced and not influenced by the size of the institutions. In this manner, the SIR provides overall statistics of the scientific publication and other output of institutions, at the same time that enables comparisons between institutions of different sizes. It needs to be kept in mind that, once the final indicator has been calculated out of the combination of the different indicators (to which a different weigh has been assigned) the resulting values have been normalized on a scale of 0 to 100.