The procedures for data processing are as follows: First, the project staff conducted authority control on the various forms of a university name and inspected all the SCI/SSCI bibliographic records in which the address field contained one of the forms of the university name. An accurate number of the total articles from a university was obtained after removing duplicate records containing different forms of that university’s name. Second, using SCI/SSCI, this ranking system obtained the total number of citations by adding the number of citations of each article from that university, starting from the article’s inclusion in SCI/SSCI to the date of our retrieval.

Based on the measurement procedures, this ranking system calculated a university’s score for each of the eight indicators. For each indicator, the university with the highest number received the maximum points (100); the other universities’ numbers were subdivided by the highest number and were converted decimally into their respective scores. For example, if University A had the highest number M for Indicator Y, it received 100 for that indicator, while University B with a number of N received (N/M×100) for that particular indicator. Finally, the ranking system calculated the final score of each university by the indicator weightings presented in Table 1 and sorted the universities by their final scores. Universities with the same scores were sorted alphabetically. It should be noted that many universities obtained similar scores, and the slight differences of the final scores must be interpreted carefully. A university’s slightly higher score than another university’s may not necessarily suggest its superiority in scientific research because the two universities might be in very close proximity in the ranking.