URAP World Ranking is based on 6 academic performance indicators, namely articles pulished 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 is an academic performance based ranking, publications constitute the basis of the ranking methodology. Both quality and quantity of publications and international research collaboration performance are used as indicators.

URAP gathers bibliometric data about 3,500 Higher Education Institutes (HEI) through Clarivate Incites. The study includes HEIs with undergraduate degree programs. In other words, governmental  academic  institutions and research centers (e.g. Chinese  Academy  of  Sciences) are excluded from the ranking. Data for 3,500 HEIs that fit to this profile are processed  and the top 2,000 of them are scored. Thus, URAP covers approximately 10% of all HEIs in the world, which makes it one of the most comprehensive university ranking systems in the world.