Profiles Project Frequently Asked Questions

Our aim with the Global Institutional Profiles Project is to develop a data source that provides the best informed and most effective resource to build profiles of universities and institutions around the world. The Profiles Project will create data-driven portraits of globally significant institutions, combining reputational assessment, scholarly outputs, funding levels, faculty characteristics and much more in one comprehensive database. Clarivate also brings a celebrated legacy of data transparency to the Project, operating with clear methodology and data gathering practices.

Currently the project includes nearly 800 institutions. There is no firm selection policy for inclusion or exclusion. We originally selected institutions with potential to be in the ranking based upon their performance in terms of publications and citations in 6 major subject areas. We have supplemented this list with institutions that have ranked highly in previous ranking exercises (both global and domestic). We have also utilized our local knowledge from Clarivate offices worldwide. Finally, we have compared the number of institutions per country to United Nations data on researchers per country and added additional institutions from those countries that we believe might be underrepresented. We will continually expand this list for more comprehensive collection of profiles across subjects and regions.

• Supplied to US News as supplementary data published for all universities ranked in the Best Global University Ranking,
• Ingested into Clarivate’s InCites benchmarking service as a part of the Institutional Profiles dataset, which contributes to the creation of unique indicators of research performance,
• Combined with Clarivate Reputation Survey and bibliometric data to form select indicators that will be presented to you in a complimentary university profile. To obtain a sample copy of the complimentary profile, please visit https://clarivate.com/webofsciencegroup/globalprofilesproject/

No, although there is an arguable cost of not participating in terms of the lack of institution visibility

For Profiles Project information, please visit this page.

The InCites Institutional Profiles provides data summaries for the world’s leading research institutions using a combination of citation metrics from Web of Science, factual information submitted by participating institutions, and reputational data from the Clarivate annual Academic Reputation Survey. Institutional Profiles presents details on a wide array of indicators such as faculty size, reputation, funding, citation measures and more.

All Global Institutional Profile Project participants who meet the minimum data submission and minimum publication rate requirements are included in the Profiles data.

Institutions may express interest in being profiled by sending an email message to Science.profilesproject@clarivate.com.

Visit this page to complete an online inquiry form, or send an email message to Science.profilesproject@clarivate.com.

The Institutional Profiles present details on a wide array of indicators such as faculty size, student counts, reputation, funding, publication and citation measures and more.

The Institutional Profile data is updated once per year. As of 2025, the estimated time for a new update is middle of the year.

Through the annual Clarivate Academic Reputation Survey, academics around the world may highlight what they believe to be the strongest universities in their specific fields, both in teaching and research. With the ability to select from wide variety of academic disciplines and over several thousand academic institutions, scholars have great latitude in pinpointing their reputational assessment. Respondents are selected based on their field of study, and to ensure the statistical rigor of the survey, it is circulated as invitation-only. The regional distribution for survey circulation follows the United Nations percentage estimates of global academic researchers by (sub) continent.

The survey is conducted annually in the months of September-October.

Global Institutional Profiles – methodology

Though the number varies a bit each year, roughly 1 million researchers receive an invitation to participate in the survey.

Because the survey is implemented by our partner, IPSOS, we cannot. IPSOS identified a large pool of academic contacts and statistically selected from within that contact pool to aim for a fair representation of the world’s regions and subjects. Furthermore, data protection legislation prevents us from disclosing the names of individuals or any detail of data that might make it possible to identify individuals. Survey invitations come from the domain clarivate@ts-productinfo.com or clarivate@webofscienceauthorconnect.com. You may wish to contact your IT department to prevent the emails from being blocked by spam filters.

The data collection portal URL is: https://institutionalprofilesproject.clarivate.com/. Each university’s data collection representative will be assigned a username and password to access the portal.

To obtain your username and password, please contact your dedicated regional data editor. You may also send a message to science.profilesproject@clarivate.com

If you know your username, you may visit the home page of the portal and click on “Forgot Password?” An automated process will allow you to obtain a new password.

You may stop and save data at any time and then return at a later time to continue your work. Once you are satisfied with the data you have entered, you will conduct the final data submission. Once you have completed the final data submission, you will no longer be able to alter any of the data. You will still be able to log into your account to review and print the submitted data.

Global Institutional Profiles – Data Collection Guidebook  – section 3

Global Institutional Profiles – Data Collection Guidebook  – section 4

Once selected, you cannot change the currency from within the data collection portal. Contact your regional data editor to have the currency selection changed.

If you need to alter data after you have made the final data submission in the data collection tool, please contact your regional data editor as soon as possible. Your editor can unlock your account to allow you to make changes.

Yes, you may download a complete set of screen prints here

There is also a Print & Review feature within the tool itself; this will display a formatted report of all the data fields where you have supplied data, including the previous 4 years of data that you may have supplied.

Guidelines and documentation are built into the collection portal pages. All support materials are available here.

You may also contact your regional data editor or send inquiries to science.profilesproject@clarivate.com.

Project data is collected using a Web-based data collection portal. A data collection portal account is created for each participating university. Universities will designate a single data collection representative, and account credentials are sent to that individual. Universities will work with a regional data editor to ensure timely data submission and to validate submitted data.

Due to data integrity reason, each university will only be allocated one user account to access the Data Collection Portal.

The data collection period begins in October and ends in November. Data validation exercises are conducted in December or once data is submitted, whichever is earlier.

We appreciate that supplying data for this project can be a burden for your staff. We have some flexibility around the volume of data you submit, but the minimum requirements are in place to ensure a robust and fully comparable data set.

The more data you provide, the more informative your university profile will be. Note that data entered this year will be retained for next year’s exercise, as we are committed to maintaining continuity from one year to the next.

Please visit our support site to see a list of the Overall and Subject level minimum requirements.

It is important to compare universities using data that represents the same year. We collect data that is one year back, that is, data year = data collection year -1.

In the “OVERALL” section you will submit data about your institution as a whole. This is not an automatically calculated sum of the broad subject categories, and you are required to enter the data manually. It is essential that you complete the OVERALL section as completely as possible, even if the same data is not available for the subject categories. We recognize that reporting of information for different subject areas within your institution is not precise and that there may be some overlap between the different subject areas. Therefore, we do not expect that the OVERALL information will be an exact aggregate of the different subject areas; but please ensure that it is an accurate representation of your institution as a whole.

It varies. We are collecting the following student information:

• Number of students — total FTE number of all students at all levels enrolled at the university in a given year
• Undergraduate student intake — total FTE number of first‐time or transfer students entering at the undergraduate level in a given year
• Masters student intake — total FTE number of students entering your institution at the Masters level in a given year
• Doctoral student intake — total FTE number of students entering your institution at the PhD level in a given year

The Clarivate data definitions were developed with the help of a panel of international advisors and are designed to collect information that is relevant in an international context. Consequently, these definitions may differ from the definitions used in particular geographical regions. Please use your own best judgment to provide data that is consistent with our data definitions. Please bear in mind that the data will be made publicly available. Should you have questions about how to interpret data definitions or report data, please contact your regional data editor or send an e-mail message to science.profilesproject@clarivate.com.

Yes. A caveat statement is available for each year, allowing for the optional entry of statements explaining or clarifying data. It is important to note that the statement should refer to the year the data is created rather than the year it is submitted. All caveat statements must be entered in English.

Each of the Profiles Project six broad subject categories is divided into specific subjects. You may view a breakdown of the subject categories in Section 4 of the support materials — Subject Categories. The categorization of narrow subjects into the six broad subject categories serves as a guideline only, as structures and definitions of subjects across academic institutions globally vary greatly.

You may also consult the REGIONAL SUPPORT MATERIALS section of the support pages where you will find a list of subject mapping documents which map the Clarivate subjects to various regional subject mapping schema.

We appreciate that some of the data will be difficult to provide at the subject level. Every effort should be made to provide the minimally required data for each subject level. Estimations are acceptable.

Please leave the field blank. Leaving a field blank tells us that you choose not to supply the data whereas entering a “0” tells us that you do not have activity for that category.

There is no single deadline for everyone, as different regions have different deadlines. Please refer to the original e-mail message from your regional data editor for the specific date. We are in general looking to complete the data collection for all regions by late November.

Because the Profiles Project includes institutions from around the world, the available data collection portal years reflect what we have determined to be consistently and completely available from all institutions. For that reason, we encourage our participants to submit data from the specific year even if the data is not the most recent. For the more recent data you have available, you will be able to provide it via the data collection portal next year.

Details are provided in the data collection portal Terms & Conditions, but essentially the intention is to make the data available as a profile of your institution to anyone who subscribes to InCites.

Data is also made available, in combination with Clarivate bibliometric data, to our Ranking partners. Though financial data submitted is used to create ranking metrics such as “institutional income per academic staff,” no financial data is shared with Ranking partners for the purpose of publicly displaying the submitted data.

Where possible, we have pre-populated university contact information using data found on the university website. We are obtaining teaching and research data from the following:

United Kingdom — Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA)

It is still necessary for institutions to check the pre-populated data before conducting the final submission. Where publically accessible data is available, we will also use these data sources to validation institutional data submissions.

A HESA Data Pre-Population Methodology document is available upon request to science.profilesproject@clarivate.com.

Academic staff should include permanent staff and staff that are employed on a long-term contract basis. For all of the data points being collected, we realize that interpretations by universities will vary somewhat. For academic staff, the stated distinction of “permanent staff and staff that are employed on a long-term contract basis” is there to discourage the reporting of temporary, short-term personnel. We are looking for a number that represents the overall, stable size of your academic staff.

For universities in some regions, it is a bit confusing, as some refer to the skills of mechanics, electricians, etc., as “vocational.” Here are some web definitions to consider:

• occupation is a field or an area of work, for instant; agriculture, business, medicine.
• vocation is a specific work in an occupation e.g. building construction or electrical works in technical.

Occupational education comes in various forms. For example, students who plan to become plumbers or electricians often work as apprentices to get hands-on training, while others attend vocational schools to become certified nursing assistants, hairdressers or barbers.

In some regions, vocational education may be classified as teaching procedural knowledge. This can be contrasted with declarative knowledge, as used in education in a usually broader scientific field, which might concentrate on theory and abstract conceptual knowledge, characteristic of tertiary education. So one can see why, when we say to exclude “occupational professions,” this might be interpreted to include medical (and similar) students, which, of course, is not our meaning. Data representing all professional studies, e.g., medical, law, etc., should be included in the data collection process.

Institutional Profiles utilize use the Clarivate Web of Science data, considered the gold standard by many evaluation bodies globally

The following three Web of Science (WoS) databases are used with Articles, Reviews and Notes selected:

• Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED)
• Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI)
• Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI)

To participate in the Global Institutional Profiles Project, a university should have at least 100 articles over a 5-year period. The time frame used is from X to Y where X = current year -5 and Y = current year -1. For the subject normalization we use the standard WoS 250 subject categories. Conference Proceedings Citation Index (CPCI) will not be used.

Work is done prior to the analysis to include all publications authored by each university, including those papers where the institutional affiliation uses alternative names, affiliated institutions, old names and other variants.

Clinicians who hold academic posts should be included in the academic staff counts. Every effort should be made to count the academic staff in terms of FTE, so if clinicians are serving in an academic capacity on a part-time basis, they should be counted as such.

Please use the definition given below to account for “diplom” awarded

• Programs of five or more year’s duration preparing for a first degree/qualification should be included in this level if equivalent to master level program in terms of the complexity of content. This will include students studying for “diplom” or other equivalent program. This is sometimes referred to as a “long first degree”. Therefore, please count:
  • Bachelor degrees and diplom degrees as undergraduate degrees
  • Master degrees and diplom degrees as masters’ degrees
• Furthermore, please count new students in diplom courses as undergraduate student intake.

Since it is preferable that all subject level data be supplied, we suggest obtaining the declared undergraduate subject level numbers from 4-5 of the previous years, calculating percentages for the actual student majors, and then applying the percentages to the undeclared students to arrive at estimated subject level data.