In Ranking 2001, we mainly adjusted the secondary indicator and their weight. The primary indicators and their weight remain the same as in year 2000.

The adjustment of 2001 is mainly manifested in 2 phases:
1. Add secondary indicator "Number of Key Academic Bases of Humanity and Social Science" under "Academic Standing", and adjust weight of other secondary indicators accordingly.
2. Adjust the weight of secondary indicators under "Academic Achievements".

To accomplish the first two adjustments, our project group carried out two rounds of survey. In the first round, 70 surveys were sent out and 42 were taken back; in the second round, 42 surveys were sent out and 31 were taken back. Through Stratum Analysis and Delphi Analysis, we consolidated the result of these two rounds. After schematized statistical analysis, we found two results strongly connected.

Besides, during the evaluation work of Ranking 2001, we subdivided " Average income of R&D staff" into Liberal Arts and Science. Instead of simply adding the two bunches of expenditure together, we adopted certain algorithm in responding to the fact that expenditure of liberal arts was less than that of Science. After rounds of discussion between the Ranking Evaluation group and Netbig, we decided not to distinguish key universities from non-key universities. Accordingly, we adopted the indicators for key universities in 2000 to all the universities in 2001. This seems to be unfair to non-key universities that have always been focusing on teaching. But when taking into account the difficulty in distinguishing key universities from non-key ones, and the inclination reflected by the choice of indicators, we decided to unify the standard to simplify the operation. In this way, we also give enough freedom to our readers to interpret the result.