How U.S. News & World Report sources the experts behind its rankings
The authority behind Best Colleges, Best Hospitals, and dozens more rankings runs on finding the right people: U.S. News uses Clodo to source the niche experts and practitioners it surveys and consults to build its rankings and editorial.
U.S. News & World Report is an American media company best known for its authoritative rankings and consumer advice, including Best Colleges, Best Graduate Schools, Best Hospitals, Best Cars, and Best States. Its rankings combine quantitative data with the judgment of qualified experts, gathered through peer and reputational surveys and editorial expertise across dozens of specialized fields.
The resultsSourcing the experts behind the rankings, by the numbers.
- Experts sourced2,500+
- Contact enrichment coverage92%
- Hours saved sourcing per month31
The situation
U.S. News & World Report is best known for its rankings: Best Colleges, Best Hospitals, Best Graduate Schools, Best Cars, and dozens more. Behind each one is a methodology that leans on the judgment of the right experts: academics, clinicians, and specialists who complete peer and reputational surveys or lend editorial expertise.
The hard part isn’t running the survey. It’s finding the exact, credentialed people qualified to answer it, at scale, across dozens of niche fields. A department chair in pediatric cardiology or a dean of engineering at an R1 university doesn’t fall out of a simple title filter.
“Speed is everything... Clodo has fundamentally changed our velocity when working some of these niche verticals.”
The sourcing motion
U.S. News teams describe the expert they need in plain language (by specialty, seniority, institution type, and credential), and Clodo returns a ranked, enriched, contactable list of the people who actually fit.
That turns weeks of manual desk research into a single search, so the team spends its time on the survey and the story, not on hunting down who to send it to.
Rankings are only as trusted as their inputs
Reputational and peer surveys only carry weight when they reach the right respondents. Sourcing precisely (the credentialed experts in each field) is what keeps the data, and the rankings built on it, authoritative.
From one category to dozens
The same plain-language sourcing motion works whether the panel is oncologists, admissions deans, or automotive engineers, so standing up a new ranked category doesn’t mean rebuilding the research process from scratch.
Find and reach your target persona at the speed of thought.
