About our data

Where the data comes from

Universities: OpenAlex institutions, linked to the Research Organization Registry (ROR).

Public or private: Wikidata; for Japan and Korea also Wikipedia’s lists of national, public and private universities; and manual checks against official lists. Universities we could not check are marked “Not verified”.

Research fields, papers and professors: OpenAlex. Citations and other profile details are fetched live from OpenAlex when you open a profile.

Researcher identifiers: ORCID iDs as recorded in OpenAlex. Locations: GeoNames, through ROR.

Funding: checked by hand on each scheme’s official page. Every scheme shows its official link and the date it was last checked.

How universities are ranked

Your graduate subject is linked to a set of research fields (for example, CSE to Computer Science, Engineering and Mathematics). Universities are compared within their country by research output and impact in those fields over the last five years, and by how specialised they are.

This measures research strength. It is not a teaching ranking and says nothing about your chances of admission.

How professors are found

There is no global list of professors, so we use OpenAlex author records whose latest institution is the university. We list established researchers who published recently: in science, engineering and medicine at least 20 papers and an h-index of 12, with lower thresholds in the social sciences and humanities.

These profiles are marked “Likely faculty · auto”. The list can include postdocs or researchers who have moved. Each profile shows up to three main research fields.

We never copy data from Google Scholar or ResearchGate. We only link to a profile there when the address comes from an allowed source.

Confirmed and typical funding

“Confirmed” means a specific scheme that this university hosts or takes part in and that is open to your nationality. “Typical” means the usual pattern in that country, for example that PhD students in the US are often funded through assistantships.

We never mark a university as self-funded by default. When we do not know, we say unknown. Always confirm on the official page before you apply.

Limitations

Open data has gaps and mistakes: one person can appear as two profiles (or two as one), affiliations can be out of date, and funding rules change every year.

Professor search matches the main name only, not other spellings of it.

Early-career faculty with fewer papers are not listed yet.

Report a mistake

Every university and professor page has a “Report wrong info” link, and every professor page has a “Remove my profile” link. We review every report.