For Pakistan, the bigger question is whether these rankings reflect what matters most: research that translates into innovation, funding and national impact.

For Pakistan, the debate over rankings should therefore become a broader debate about what we expect research to achieve—and how the Higher Education Commission can encourage universities to demonstrate that impact.

But if we measure research quality alongside innovation, relevance, technology transfer, industry engagement and social and economic impact, universities will pursue broader outcomes.

Times Higher Education (THE) and QS rankings can tell very different stories about the same university. For Pakistan, the bigger question is whether these rankings reflect what matters most: research that translates into innovation, funding and national impact.

Why does the same university sometimes look remarkably different in the Times Higher Education and QS world rankings? The question sounds simple, but the answer reveals something much bigger about the way universities—and increasingly entire higher education systems—measure research. The temptation, whenever a new ranking is released, is to look at the number first. Did the university rise? Did it fall? Who moved ahead? Who slipped behind? Perhaps the more useful question is: what exactly is the ranking measuring? This distinction matters because THE and QS may be working with broadly similar bibliometric data, yet they can tell very different stories about the same institution. At the heart of the difference is a deceptively simple choice: what do you divide research performance by? QS’s Citations per Faculty indicator essentially asks how much cited research is produced in relation to the size of the academic faculty. THE’s research-quality framework, by contrast,........

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