Universities come in all shapes and sizes, and there are many different types of institutional metrics that be can be used to compare them. One of the best known to most Canadians is the annual Maclean's rankings, but there many more.
Like other universities, these metrics are important to York, as is clear from this quote from the Introduction to the (draft) Plan for the Intensification and Enhancement of Research (2016):
[I]n the QS World University Rankings 2015 of history departments, York was placed 51st in the world, and fourth in Canada, 8th in Canada for business research, the top 100 for history and the top 150 for English language and literature, modern languages. The Schulich School of Business ranks 19th in the world and 1st in Canada as ranked in the annual global MBA survey conducted by CNN Expansion. At the same time York ranks between 301-350 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE), 441-450 in the QS World University Rankings for 2015/16, and 410 overall in the CWTS Leiden International Ranking. In Canada, York's 2015 overall Research Infosource Ranking 26th amongst Canadian Universities....
The disciplinary differences (see Limitation of bibliometrics) scale up at the institutional level and favour STEM over the humanities and social sciences, as the report acknowledges about the major sources of citation information:
It is recognized that both widely-used databases, Scopus and InCites, are incomplete and are much less adept at capturing books and book chapters that feature prominently in York's scholarly output. Although these deficiencies impact all institutions, the effect may be proportionally larger for York than most.
SciVal is the best source we have for citation-based institutional metrics, but bear that disclaimer in mind. (We have more information about SciVal and how to use it. It requires users to set up an account, but anyone with a York email address can do this.)
Other institutional metrics, openly available: