Research Indicators service contributes to Times Higher Education Impact Rankings success
10 Jul 2025
John Hynes discusses how the Library’s Research Indicators service (based within the Office for Open Research) worked together with Dr Julian Skyrme (Executive Director for Social Responsibility), contributing to The University of Manchester’s success in the Times Higher Education Impact Rankings.
You may have seen the great news recently about The University of Manchester’s performance in the latest THE Impact Rankings – the University has maintained our position as 1st in the UK and Europe, and 2nd in the world. This is a fantastic achievement for the University, the Office for Social Responsibility, and reflects its strong commitment to Social Responsibility and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
I wanted to take a moment to highlight that the Research Indicators team have played a small but meaningful role in this success – and to say thank you to Beth, Mikey, and anyone else who contributes to our SDG-related work (which usually takes place just after Christmas each year!).
If you're curious about how we contribute, we are always happy to chat – but you can also get a quick overview by looking at the methodology section of the THE Impact ranking.
Our contributions include:
- Providing bibliometric data that helps the Office for Social Responsibility assess our research against all 16 SDGs.
- Supporting SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals, through significant work that helps UoM meet ranking criteria such as:
- Research involving SDGs or collaborations with low- and lower-middle-income (LMI) countries (27.1%)
- Publication of SDG reports (27.2%)
In particular, thanks to Beth’s scripts developed at pace in 2024 (and our enhancements this year), we’re now able to reliably identify research collaborations with LMI countries. This not only supports the University's reporting for SDG 17 but also creates new opportunities to identify potential future collaborations with researchers based in LMI countries.
The University’s SDG-focused report is highly regarded across the sector and undoubtedly contributed to our very strong score of 94.5 for SDG 17.
The Research Indicators team provides the data which features on pages 22–24 of the report – and which also feeds into each of the individual SDG sections.
Quote from Julian Skyrme
Dr Julian Skyrme, Executive Director for Social Responsibility and who oversees the ranking submission each year, said, “The work of the Library has been instrumental in our continued world-leading position for SDG impact. For example, the way we systematically collect, analyse and act upon SDG data has led to significant improvements in the quality of our reporting and on our global partnerships with low and middle income countries - both key elements of SDG17 (Partnerships for the Goals). Staff in the Office for Open Research Team in the Library should be rightly proud of their contribution to this success.”