I¡¯ve always said that there¡¯s no such thing as a ¡°correct¡± university ranking. Every ranking is based on subjective decisions made by the compilers: what eligibility criteria to use, what indicators to include, and what weight to give them, for example.

So I have always been relaxed about the worldwide proliferation of university rankings. It is healthy to understand that different universities with different missions and contexts should have different metrics and indicators to best reflect their own strategic priorities. Students too, with their own different needs and priorities, also want tailored information, so having a range of different rankings with different methodologies is healthy, as long as users take a good look at the methodology to understand what they are actually looking at.

It is also healthy to accept that there¡¯s no single, definitive ¡°best¡± university. Excellence comes in many diverse forms, and not always with a huge endowment in the Global North.

At Times Higher Education, we pride ourselves on providing relevant, rigorous performance data and benchmarks to support the global higher education sector: governments and university leaders, as well as academics and would-be students and their families, trust our data to inform their decision-making. And we take great care to be mindful to recognise and respect the great diversity of higher education institutions from around the world.

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This deep understanding of the sector we have served since our foundation in 1971 is why 91ÇÑ×Ó¡¯s rankings have become, for so many, the ¡°gold standard¡± in a very crowded space.

But while we remain committed to the core principle that a diversity of universities in a diversity of contexts with a diversity of missions requires a diversity of measures and metrics, we are confirming today a simplification of our famous World University Rankings outputs.

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The process of simplification that we aim to undertake will not diminish our commitment to providing data in the right context to suit the diversity of needs. Rather, it will offer our wide range of users clarity and simplicity, will enable us to refocus on our core and deeply trusted rankings, and?will?make our humble contribution to calming the increasing noise and confusion in the wider, global rankings space, much of it beyond our control.

The World University Rankings remain at our core

The World University Rankings were launched in 2004 specifically for research-intensive, globally focused universities collaborating and attracting talent across international borders. The world ranking only includes universities with a track record of publishing research in recognised research journals, books and conference proceedings (at least 1,000 outputs over the past five years) and its metrics focus most on international research and reputation.

Our separate Impact Rankings are designed for all universities, not just a global research elite, that want to demonstrate their social and economic impact and their commitment to a sustainable future, through their teaching, research, stewardship of their resources and outreach to communities, business and government. The methodology is clear that this can be local, regional, national or global, and the impact outputs reflect a gloriously diverse global higher education sector, with universities from the Global South competing and demonstrating excellence alongside, and often ahead of, those in the traditionally dominant Global North nations.

We¡¯ll be confirming some changes to the Impact Rankings very soon but in terms of the World University Rankings, the changes are simple.

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Regional derivatives with greater synergy

The core world ranking, based on a comprehensive and balanced range of 18 separate performance indicators, across teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook, remains our flagship annual ranking of the world¡¯s leading research universities, with its 11 related subject-level rankings using the same broad methodology. Our regional university rankings, which include the Asia University Rankings, Arab University Rankings and Latin America University Rankings, will continue to be published annually to provide deeper and richer regional context and regional analysis?¨C but they will all become more direct derivatives of the overall world university rankings. As is already the case with the Asia rankings, they will now all use the same data set and broadly the same range of indicators as the overall world rankings. This provides greater synergy and clarity across the world ranking and the regional derivatives while allowing for a closer look at the relevant regional context and giving us the opportunity to go deeper into regions to rank more universities than in the overall world ranking.

The continued importance of our Academic Reputation Survey

The backbone of the world rankings and its regional derivatives is ¨C and will continue to be?¨C our annual Academic Reputation Survey, which makes up a significant proportion of the indicator weightings. This survey is the largest invitation-only, statistically representative academic reputation survey in the world, and it now collects about 50,000 statistically-representative responses from academics each year, giving us a vast database on the standing of thousands of universities worldwide, by subject and by region.

Moving forward, this rich and comprehensive reputation data will form the basis of all regional rankings as well as the overall world rankings. This means we will no longer distribute the separate annual Arab World Academic Reputation Survey as the Arab ranking is brought back directly into the world rankings framework. We will also discontinue the niche, stand-alone World Reputation Rankings, while retaining and enhancing all the rich insights we can provide from the continuing annual reputation survey.

And as our world university rankings allow users to filter the results for any country or group of countries they choose, the bespoke?Sub-Saharan Africa University Rankings?will be discontinued. The Young University Rankings?and Online Learning Rankings will also be discontinued.

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Our pioneering Interdisciplinary Science Rankings, developed in partnership with Schmidt Science Fellows, will continue to be an important part of our portfolio, sitting in their own niche under the world rankings umbrella of research-intensive universities.

We are confident that these changes will offer greater simplicity and clarity, while retaining the principle ¨C with our world rankings portfolio sitting alongside our work on impact and sustainability?¨C that a diversity of missions and context requires a diversity of measures and metrics.

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Phil Baty is chief?global affairs officer at?Times Higher Education.