There is no simple recipe for success on improving a university's reputation, but enhancing investment and embracing internationalization will help Chinese universities,Times Higher Education's editor Phil Baty told People's Daily Online.

Baty suggests China should increase investment in universities in order to attract the best faculty and the best student. Chinese universities should also more internationalize in research collaboration and networks, and recruitment.

The following is the excerpt of People's Daily Online's written interview with Phil Baty after the World Reputation Ranking was released on March 6, 2014.

People's Daily Online: What are the discrepancies between China's universities and other higher-ranking universities such as Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Berkeley? How can Chinese universities narrow this gap?

Phil Baty: Higher education in the USA has traditionally been exceptionally strong across multiple indicators: it has enjoyed very healthy resources (and many leading US institutions now have massive endowment funds), it remains the most attractive country for international students and international researchers, and its graduates are held in very high regard by employers around the world. US institutions also have a head start on Chinese institutions in the sense that it was not until the 1990s that there was a renewed focus on developing world class universities in China. They have also gained from the US's historic global dominance in many other world spheres, which has helped to ensure that they have a very wide global influence and impact, although the more general balance of power may now be shifting. The Chinese commitment to developing world class universities is now extremely strong, and very exciting, but it has been a relatively recent phenomenon, and it will take time to take full effect.

People's Daily Online: What is your suggestion for China's universities to improve reputation?

Phil Baty: There is no simple, single recipe for success when it comes to improving reputation, but there are several factors that are bound to help.

Firstly, increased investment ensures that the best faculty is attracted to a university, and allows for the provision of facilities to attract the best students. It also permits the proliferation of world-class research papers – all this will not go unnoticed by the academic community.

Embracing internationalization is also a key factor when it comes to improving reputation – greater international research collaboration and networks, and greater recruitment of international faculty and students helps to show the rest of the academic community the great works a university is undertaking.

People's Daily Online: World Reputation Ranking, a subsidiary of World University Ranking, was released by THE in 2011. How are the two rankings different in terms of their focus? Which aspect or major field does the World Reputation Ranking examine?

Phil Baty: As stated above, The Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings are based purely on academic opinion, according to the world’s largest survey of academic opinion. The Times Higher Education World University Rankings examine all core missions of a modern, global university: teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international activity. They are the only rankings to do this, and are the most carefully calibrated and highly respected rankings available.

They use 13 separate indicators to consider a university's performance.

This includes analysing 50,000,000 citations from 12,000 carefully selected Academic journals and 6,000,000 papers. These are analysed using a six year window (2007-2013) as citations take time to accumulate. Indeed, this also minimizes the impact of exceptionally highly cited papers.

Note: To view the full rankings, please visit www.thewur.com