The latest edition of University Ranking by Academic Performance (URAP) shows an increasingly bipolar research world with China dominating engineering and the hard sciences while the USA and the UK still lead in the humanities and the social sciences.
URAP is published by the Informatics Institute at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. It is based entirely on objective public data and now ranks 3,000 universities.
There are six indicators:
- Article: Articles published in journals in the first three quartiles for Journal Impact Factor in 2023 (21% weighting)
- Citation: Number of citations in 2019-2023 for total documents published in the same period (10% weighting)
- Total Documents: All documents published in 2019-2023 (21% weighting)
- Article Impact Total: Normalized citations per paper multiplied by number of publications paper in 24 subject areas (18% weighting)
- Citation Impact Total: Normalized citations per paper multiplied by the number of citations in 24 subject areas (15% weighting)
- International Collaboration: Total number of articles published in collaboration with international universities (15% weighting).
All data are derived from InCites.
The world rankings were published last March and the Field rankings at the end of July.
The field rankings show that China continues to dominate engineering research while the USA leads for the social sciences and British and continental universities are still world leaders in the humanities.
Tsinghua University holds first place for Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Energy and Fuels, Engineering, Technology, Materials Engineering and Metallurgy Engineering, while Beihang University leads for Aeronautical Engineering and Shanghai Jiao Tong University for Industrial Engineering.
Artificial intelligence is dominated by universities in Mainland China and the Chinese diaspora. Out of the top fifty universities in this field, thirty-five are located in the Mainland, three in the Special Administrative Regions, and two in Singapore, including front runner Nanyang Technological University. No US institution makes the top 50, although MIT comes close in 52nd place.
However, the USA and the UK, especially Harvard and Oxford still do well in the social sciences and humanities. Harvard leads for Economics and Sociology and Oxford for Anthropology, History, and Political Science.