The URAP University Ranking by Academic Performance is based on 6 academic performance indicators, namely articles published in the last year, citations accrued in the past 5 years, total documents published in the past 5 years, articles published with international co-authors, article impact total and citation impact total. Since URAP Ranking is an academic performance based ranking, publications constitute the basis of the ranking methodology. URAP Ranking gathers bibliometric data about 3,500 Higher Education Institutes (HEI) through Clarivate Incites. A detailed description of each indicator is provided below:

Article (21%) - It is a measure of current scientific productivity which includes articles published in journals that are listed within the first, second and third quartiles in terms of their Journal Impact Factor. 

Citation (21%) - It is a measure of research impact and scored according to the total number of citations received in 2017-2021 for the total documents published in 2017-2021 in journals that include more than 1000 authors are excluded. 

Total Document (10%) – It is the measure of sustainability and continuity of scientific productivity and presented by the total document count which covers all scholarly output of the institutions, including conference papers, reviews, letters, discussions, scripts in addition to journal articles published during 2017-2021 period. The total document counts are not subjected to any filtering.

Article Impact Total AIT (18%) - It is a measure of scientific productivity corrected by the institution's normalized CPP(1) with respect to the world CPP in 24 subject areas between 2021 and 2021. 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 24 fields. This indicator aims to balance the institution's scientific productivity with the field normalized impact generated by those publications in each field. 

Citation Impact Total CIT (15%) - It is a measure of research impact corrected by the institution's normalized CPP with respect to the world CPP in 24 subject areas between 2017 and 2021. 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 24 fields. This indicator aims to balance the institution's scientific impact with the field normalized impact generated by the publications in each field.

International Collaboration (15%) - It is a measure of global acceptance of a university. International collaboration data, which is based on the total number of articles published in collaboration with foreign universities, is obtained from InCites for the years 2017-2021.