The QS World University Rankings are based on five indicators: academic reputation, employer reputation, student-to-staff ratio, internationalisation and citations per faculty. The more often a publication is cited by fellow researchers, the more influential the research becomes. As citation rates tend to be much higher in the life sciences compared to the humanities, an advantage was given to universities with particularly strong life science profiles. QS corrected the difference this year, which helps to explain UM’s drop in rankings.

President of the UM Executive Board, Martin Paul, reflects on the context. 'This once again shows how dependent these rankings are on the selected parameters. For us, they are not a primary goal but a good way to learn where improvements can be made in terms of the quality of our research and education. That said, placing in the top 200 of 17,000 universities worldwide is an impressive achievement. This puts all Dutch universities in the top 2% of the world.'