The University Ranking by Academic Performance[1] (URAP) is a university ranking developed by the Informatics Institute[2] of Middle East Technical University. Since 2010, it has been publishing annual national[3] and global[4] college and university rankings for top 2000 institutions. The scientometrics measurement of URAP is based on data obtained from the Institute for Scientific Information via Web of Science and inCites. For global rankings, URAP employs indicators of research performance including the number of articles, citation, total documents, article impact total, citation impact total, and international collaboration. In addition to global rankings, URAP publishes regional rankings for universities in Turkey using additional indicators such as the number of students and faculty members obtained from Center of Measuring, Selection and Placement ÖSYM.

Methodology

URAP gathers data from international bibliometric databases such as Web of Science and InCites provided by the Institute for Scientific Information. URAP uses data of 2,500 Higher Education Institutions (HEI) with highest number of articles published. The overall score of each HEI is based on its performance over several indicators. Of 2500 selected HEIs, the top 2000 are included in the rankings published by URAP. Field based rankings are performed on 23 fields based on Australia ERA.[5]

Indicators

URAP uses 6 main indicator to measure the academic performance. These indicators are number of articles, citation, total documents, article impact total, citation impact total, and international collaboration. The raw bibliometric data underlying URAP's 6 main indicators have highly skewed distribution. To address this issue, the median of the indicators have been used. The Delphi system was conducted with a group of experts to assign weighting scores to the indicators. Total score of 600 is distributed to indicators. URAP uses additional indicators for ranking universities in Turkey including the number of students and faculty members. The following table shows the indicators used for global rankings in URAP as of 2014.

Indicator Objective Weight (out of 600) Source
Number of Articles Scientific Productivity %21 InCites
Citation Research Impact %21 InCites
Total Documents Scientific Productivity %10 InCites
Article Impact Total Research Quality %18 InCites
Citation Impact Total Research Quality %15 InCites
International Collaboration International Acceptance %15 InCites

Number of articles

Number of articles is used as a measure of current scientific productivity which includes articles indexed by Web of Science. This indicator covers articles, reviews and notes. The weight of this indicator in the overall ranking is %21.

Citation

Citation, as an indicator in URAP ranking, is a measure of research impact. It is scored according to the total number of citations received. The weight of this indicator in the overall ranking is %21.

Total documents

Total documents is the measure of sustainability and continuity of scientific productivity. The total document count covers all scholarly literature provided by the Web of Science database, including conference papers, reviews, letters, discussions, scripts, and journal articles. The weight of this indicator in the overall ranking is %10.

Article Impact Total (AIT)

Article Impact Total (AIT) is a measure of scientific productivity adjusted by the ratio of institution's Citation Per Publication (CPP) to the world CPP in 23 subject areas. The ratio of the institution's CPP and the world CPP indicates whether the institution is performing above or below the world average in that field. This ratio is multiplied by the number of publications in that field and then summed across the 23 fields, as shown in the following formula:

The weight of this indicator in the overall ranking is %18.

Citation Impact Total (CIT)

Citation Impact Total (CIT) is a measure of research impact corrected by the institution's normalized CPP with respect to the world CPP in 23 subject areas. The ratio of the institution's CPP and the world CPP indicates whether the institution is performing above or below the world average in that field. This ratio is multiplied by the number of citations in that field and then summed across the 23 fields, as shown in the following formula:

The weight of this indicator in the overall ranking is %15.

International collaboration

International Collaboration is a measure of global acceptance of the institution. International collaboration data, which is based on the total number of published studies conducted in collaboration with foreign universities, is obtained from InCites. The weight of this indicator in the overall ranking is %15.

Current rankings

Global ranking

University Ranking by Academic Performance—Top 50[a]
Institution 2021-22[6] 2020-21[7] 2019–20[8] 2018–19[9] 2017–18[10] 2016–17[11] 2015–16[12] 2014–15[13]
United States Harvard University 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Canada University of Toronto 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
United Kingdom University College London 3 4 3 5 6 5 6 6
United States Stanford University 4 3 4 4 5 4 8 7
United Kingdom University of Oxford 5 5 5 3 3 3 3 3
United States Johns Hopkins University 6 6 6 6 8 6 4 4
United Kingdom University of Cambridge 7 7 7 7 9 8 5 5
United States University of Michigan 8 8 8 9 11 10 10 10
United States University of Washington 9 10 9 10 12 11 11 11
China Tsinghua University 10 12 12 18 25 38 48 58
China Shanghai Jiao Tong University 11 18 19 24 32 39 50 59
United Kingdom Imperial College London 12 13 13 11 16 15 15 15
France University of Paris-Saclay 13 9 94[b] 91[b] 80[b] 87[b] 70[b] 69[b]
United States University of Pennsylvania 14 15 14 15 14 13 13 13
China Zhejiang University 15 20 20 31 33 34 42 46
United States University of California, Los Angeles 16 16 15 13 13 12 12 12
United States Massachusetts Institute of Technology 17 11 11 8 7 7 7 9
France Sorbonne University 18 14 10 17 4[c] 26[c] 26[c] 25[c]
United States Columbia University 19 17 16 14 15 14 14 14
Australia University of Sydney 20 24 24 23 26 27 29 30
Denmark University of Copenhagen 21 19 18 16 17 16 16 22
China Peking University 22 21 21 22 29 33 44 48
Australia University of Melbourne 23 25 23 26 30 31 30 29
France University of Paris 24 23 97[d] 95[d] 87[d] 85[d] 78[d] 76[d]
United States University of California, San Diego 25 26 22 19 18 17 17 16
United States University of California, San Francisco 26 30 31 28 24 22 19 18
Singapore National University of Singapore 27 32 28 30 27 29 32 34
United States Cornell University 28 28 29 25 23 25 25 24
Canada University of British Columbia 29 29 27 27 21 21 22 20
United States Yale University 30 27 26 21 20 19 20 21
Brazil University of São Paulo 31 33 33 38 36 40 35 31
Australia Monash University 32 37 39 46 53 57 62 64
United States University of California, Berkeley 33 22 17 12 10 9 9 8
Australia University of Queensland 34 35 35 39 40 41 43 51
China Sun Yat-sen University 35 48 60 83 93 99 113 116
United States Duke University 36 34 34 33 28 24 24 23
Japan University of Tokyo 37 31 25 20 19 18 18 17
Belgium KU Leuven 38 38 37 42 41 23 23 38
Australia University of New South Wales 39 42 44 52 60 71 74 78
Netherlands University of Amsterdam 40 40 48 51 63 61 61 61
United States Ohio State University 41 39 38 36 38 37 33 32
China Huazhong University of Science and Technology 42 49 56 81 94 111 135 155
United States University of Pittsburgh 43 43 40 35 35 32 31 28
Sweden Karolinska Institute 44 50 51 48 51 53 60 57
China Fudan University 45 54 58 62 68 74 90 94
United States University of Chicago 46 36 30 29 22 20 21 19
United States Northwestern University 47 46 45 43 46 38 37 37
Netherlands Utrecht University 48 45 42 40 45 44 37 35
South Korea Seoul National University 49 51 47 49 44 50 36 42
United States University of Minnesota 50 44 32 32 31 28 27 27

Rankings by field

Commentary and reception

URAP covers considerably more institutions than other major ranking systems. In a section about URAP in “Where Are the Global Rankings Leading Us? An Analysis of Recent Methodological Changes and New Developments” published in the European Journal of Education it is mentioned that ”While it is less well-known than SRG, ARWU, THE, and QS, it is interesting because it published a list of 2000 universities, while the above rankings cover a maximum of 700 universities.”[14] This is also mentioned in the “EUA report on Ranking for 2013 “ published by the European University Association. It indicates that URAP, along with SCImago ranking system, “fill an important gap in the rankings market in that their indicators measure the performance of substantially more universities, up to 2000 in the case of URAP and over 3000 in SCImago, compared to only 400 in THE, 500 in SRC ARWU, NTU ranking and CWTS Leiden, and around 700 in QS.”[15]

URAP is mentioned as one of the four ranking systems that solely measure the academic performance. The other three are Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities, CWTS Leiden Ranking, and SCImago Institutions Rankings.[16] URAP excludes teaching indicators, such as student quality and teaching performance, from global rankings and only covers research-oriented indicators.[14][17] In the “International Benchmarking in UK higher Education”[18] report of the Higher Education Statistics Agency, URAP is listed among the benchmarking resources for measuring academic. In the same report, URAP is categorized in the “whole university rankings” along with Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE), QS World University Rankings, Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), CHE Excellence Rankings, RatER Global University Ranking of World Universities, Webometrics Ranking of World Universities, 2010 World University Ranking, SIR World Report, CWTS Leiden Ranking, U-Multirank, European Research Ranking, Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities, Human Resources & Labor Review (HRLR), and Professional Classification of Higher Education Institutions.

URAP in Research, Books, and Reports

URAP is mentioned and used in several studies based on, or referring to, global rankings. In the “World University Ranking Systems: An Alternative Approach Using Partial Least Squares Path Modeling”[16] article, published in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, Urap is incorporated in the suggested model as one of the nine major worldwide university ranking systems along with ARWU, QS, Times, Webometrics, Taiwan. Leiden, SIR, and CWUR. In the same article, URAP is categorized among the ranking systems that are based solely on publication performance. The other ranking systems in the same category are Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities, CWTS Leiden Ranking, and SCImago Institutions Rankings.

The following is a list of some of the books, peer reviewed articles, and conference proceedings that have covered URAP or have incorporated it in their models or comparisons.

URAP in Press

URAP in university reports and websites

Annual URAP ranking results are used by a number of listed universities to indicate their academic performance. The following is a short list of links to university pages that has mentioned URAP results either independently or in conjunction with other ranking results.

Criticism

The indicators used in URAP are absolute values and size-dependent making it biased towards larger institutions.[15][17] According to the “EUA report on Ranking for 2013“ published by the European University Association, URAP disregards books, excludes studies in arts and humanities areas, and under-represents social sciences. Furthermore, URAP does not employ any compensation for different publication cultures due to the lack of field-normalization of the results of bibliometric indicators. The report further states that “The results of the indicator on citation numbers in particular, as well as those on publication counts, are thus skewed towards the natural sciences and especially medicine.” It also states that excluding teaching indicators by URAP makes its focus solely on research-oriented institutions.[15]

The “University Ranking Lists: A directory” report published by the Division for Analysis and Evaluation of the University of Gothenburg points out a problem that might arise from including more than 500 institutions in the ranking system. It states that “It [URAP] lists 2000 universities, and the purpose is to provide a ranking that covers not only institutions in the Western elite group. This purpose contrasts starkly with other ranking producers’ decisions not to publish more than the 400-500 top positions of their lists, since they do not consider their methods reliable below that level. [URAP] do not comment this problem.”[28]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ This table lists the top 50 institutions as of the 2020–21 rankings.
  2. ^ a b c d e f As University of Paris-Sud.
  3. ^ a b c d As Pierre and Marie Curie University.
  4. ^ a b c d e f As Paris Diderot University.

Notes and references

  1. ^ "University Ranking by Academic Performance". Archived from the original on 2 September 2011. Retrieved 23 March 2015.
  2. ^ "Middle East Technical University, Graduate School of Informatics". Retrieved 23 March 2015.
  3. ^ "URAP Türkiye Özel Bölümü" (in Turkish). Archived from the original on 2 September 2011. Retrieved 6 March 2015.
  4. ^ "World Ranking". Archived from the original on 14 December 2018. Retrieved 7 March 2015.
  5. ^ "ERA 2015, Excellence in Research for Australia". Archived from the original on 1 April 2015. Retrieved 23 March 2015.
  6. ^ "URAP - University Ranking by Academic Academic Performance". www.urapcenter.org. 15 December 2021. Retrieved 31 December 2021.
  7. ^ "World Ranking". University Ranking by Academic Performance. Archived from the original on 6 December 2020. Retrieved 27 December 2020.
  8. ^ "2019–2020 Rankings". University Ranking by Academic Performance. Archived from the original on 18 December 2019. Retrieved 2 March 2020.
  9. ^ "2018–2019 Rankings". University Ranking by Academic Performance. Archived from the original on 6 December 2019. Retrieved 2 March 2020.
  10. ^ "2017-2018 World Ranking". University Ranking by Academic Performance. Archived from the original on 6 January 2018. Retrieved 2 March 2020.
  11. ^ "2016-2017 World Ranking". University Ranking by Academic Performance. Archived from the original on 6 June 2017. Retrieved 2 March 2020.
  12. ^ "2015-2016 World Ranking". University Ranking by Academic Performance. Archived from the original on 12 September 2016. Retrieved 2 March 2020.
  13. ^ "2014-2015 World Ranking". University Ranking by Academic Performance. Archived from the original on 23 March 2015. Retrieved 2 March 2020.
  14. ^ a b c Rauhvargers, Andrejs (March 2014). "Where Are the Global Rankings Leading Us? An Analysis of Recent Methodological Changes and New Developments". European Journal of Education. 49 (1): 29–44. doi:10.1111/ejed.12066. hdl:20.500.12799/2904.
  15. ^ a b c d Rauhvargers, Andrejs (2013). Global university rankings and their impact : report II (PDF). Brussels: European University Association. p. 65. ISBN 9789078997412. Archived from the original (PDF) on 8 April 2015. Retrieved 23 March 2015.
  16. ^ a b c Jajo, Nethal K.; Harrison, Jen (11 July 2014). "World university ranking systems: an alternative approach using partial least squares path modelling". Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management. 36 (5): 473. doi:10.1080/1360080X.2014.936090. S2CID 154548421.
  17. ^ a b "The URAP Ranking". IREG Observatory on Academic Ranking and Excellence. Retrieved 23 March 2015.
  18. ^ Boxall, Mike; Webb, Andrew; Ramsden, Brian (2011). International Benchmarking in UK Higher Education. London: PA Consulting Group. p. 11. Archived from the original on 30 March 2015. Retrieved 23 March 2015.
  19. ^ Fadeeva, Zinaida; Galkute, Laima; Mader, Clemens; Scott, Geoff (31 October 2014). Sustainable Development and Quality Assurance in Higher Education: Transformation of Learning and Society. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 29. ISBN 978-1137459138.
  20. ^ Çokgezen, Murat (2012). "Determinants of University Choice: A Study on Economics Departments in Turkey". Journal of Higher Education. 4 (1): 23–31.
  21. ^ Bassiliades, Nick (2014). "Collecting University Rankings for Comparison Using Web Extraction and Entity Linking Techniques". Information and Communication Technologies in Education, Research, and Industrial Applications. Communications in Computer and Information Science. Vol. 469. pp. 23–46. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-13206-8_2. ISBN 978-3-319-13205-1. S2CID 34466373. ((cite book)): |journal= ignored (help)
  22. ^ Alaşehir, Oğuzhan; Çakır, Murat Perit; Acartürk, Cengiz; Baykal, Nazife; Akbulut, Ural (2014). "URAP-TR: a national ranking for Turkish universities based on academic performance". Scientometrics. 101 (1): 159–178. doi:10.1007/s11192-014-1333-4. S2CID 11860359.
  23. ^ Kutlar, Aziz; Kabasakal, Ali; Ekici, Mehmet Sena (2013). "Contributions of Turkish academicians supervising PhD dissertations and their universities to economics: an evaluation of the 1990–2011 period". Scientometrics. 97 (3): 639–658. doi:10.1007/s11192-013-0973-0. S2CID 6552988.
  24. ^ Erdoğan, Melike; Kaya, İhsan (2014). "A Type-2 Fuzzy MCDM Method for Ranking Private Universities in İstanbul" (PDF). Proceedings of the World Congress on Engineering. London.
  25. ^ H. Wordofa, Kebede (April 2014). "Adoption of Web 2.0 in academic libraries of top African universities". The Electronic Library. 32 (2): 262–277. doi:10.1108/EL-07-2012-0077.
  26. ^ Citra Sondari, Mery (2013). "Examining Job Description to Develop Job Performance Indicators for Higher Education Institution Based on MBNQA Education Criteria". Journal of Education & Vocational Research. 4 (4): 101–108. doi:10.22610/jevr.v4i4.107.
  27. ^ Pusatli, O Tolga; Misra, Sanjay (2012). "Software Quality in Academic Curriculum: A Case Study in Turkey". 12th International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications (ICCSA). Salvador, Bahia, Brazil: IEEE. pp. 162–166. doi:10.1109/ICCSA.2012.40.
  28. ^ a b "University Ranking Lists:A directory" (PDF). University of Gothenburgh. 2013. p. 21.
  29. ^ "ASERF E News Bulletin on EDUCATION" (PDF). Apeejay Stya Education Research Foundation. Retrieved 25 March 2015.
  30. ^ "Thomson Reuters partners with Times on university rankings". Research Information. Retrieved 23 March 2015.
  31. ^ "Tübingen No. 5 in Germany – URAP 2012 World University Rankings" (PDF). University of Tübingen. Retrieved 24 March 2015.
  32. ^ "Turkey and Arab states announce new HE collaboration". University World News. Retrieved 23 March 2015.
  33. ^ Holmes, Richard. "Power and responsibility – The growing influence of global rankings". University World News.
  34. ^ "10 Turkish universities rank among top 500". Hurriyet Daily News. 16 July 2012.
  35. ^ "Five Romanian universities included in international rankings". Romania Insider. Retrieved 25 March 2015.
  36. ^ "THE UPC IN THE MAIN UNIVERSITY RANKINGS". Retrieved 23 March 2015.
  37. ^ "Profile of Newcastle University's rankings over recent years" (PDF). www.ncl.ac.uk/. Archived from the original (PDF) on 1 September 2015. Retrieved 7 March 2015.
  38. ^ "Current Rankings". Newcastle University. Archived from the original on 3 December 2013. Retrieved 24 March 2015.
  39. ^ "University Rankings". Mahidol University. Archived from the original on 31 August 2015. Retrieved 7 March 2015.
  40. ^ "Global Standing". Seoul National University.
  41. ^ "Annual Report for the year ended March 31, 2013" (PDF). University of Calgary.
  42. ^ "University of Pittsburgh Ranks No. 22 Globally for Scholarly Publications". University of Pittsburgh. Retrieved 24 March 2015.
  43. ^ "UCD News. UCD ranked in top 200 for 22 subjects out of 30 categories in QS World University Rankings". University College Dublin. Retrieved 24 March 2015.
  44. ^ "Griffith's global rankings in 2011" (PDF). Griffith University. Archived from the original (PDF) on 21 May 2013. Retrieved 24 March 2015.
  45. ^ "Facts and Figures" (PDF). University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Retrieved 24 March 2015.

External links

University ranking systems
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