Although selection of institutions based on university rankings is an often-used strategy (e.g., Rice et al. (2020) use the Leiden Ranking in a similar approach), it is not without flaws. First, university rankings have been criticized for their reliance on biased and unreliable reputational survey data (Waltman, Calero-Medina et al., 2012) and issues of gaming and selective reporting (Gadd, 2021). Second, rankings such as the WUR only include the most prominent institutions and leave out many institutions based on partly arbitrary criteria (e.g., how many yearly publications they need to be included). The reported groups of “high,” “medium,” and “low”-ranked universities are only relative to the set of institutions included in the ranking, and not academia as a whole. We see our use of the WUR as a pragmatic approach to reproducibly sampling universities. This does not negate their deficiencies for guiding prospective students to choose institutions or informing policy decisions.