The Times Higher Education (http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk) released its World Reputation Ranking. The ranking employs survey consultation among invited-only academics to measure reputation among several universities. It is assumed to be the world’s largest opinion survey of this sort across the globe. Every year, a list of the top 100 most powerful university brands is released.

Despite of the reputation assessment is essentially based on subjective judgements, the organization consults a wide range of recognized experts, seniors, and published academics. I plotted the aggregated information of the ranking citations. It turns out that the United States alone have 43 universities in the ranking. The second in the rank, United kingdom has only 9 universities. Australia comes in third with 6 cited institutions. Clearly, the way universities are assessed may influence the ranking. In addition, the selection of any university is certainly endogenous to the previous citations. All in all, this ranking highlights the superiority of the British tradition in higher education.

I used the readHTMLTable() function from the XLM package to download the tables from the Times Higher Education website. Then, I plotted the data using qplot() from ggplot.