For the last twelve years "Times Higher Education" (THE) has published its ranking of the best universities in the world. In the latest edition, the URV is between position 401 and 500 out of the 800 universities around the world that have been included in the ranking. The URV has been ranked in sixth position out of 25 Spanish universities, a position it shares with the Polytechnic of Catalonia, the Complutense University of Madrid and the University of Valencia

In the latest edition of the ranking published in Australia, the URV has been ranked among the top 500 universities in the world. The “THE World University Rankings” applies rigorous criteria when evaluating each university and is composed of thirteen indicators covering five major areas: teaching (30%), research (30%), internationalization (7.5%), knowledge transfer (2.5%) and citations (30%). These indicators enable the comparison of more than 1000 universities worldwide, 800 of which took a part in the ranking.

Researchers’ publications have had the greatest impact on the URV’s position in the ranking. This indicator obtained 66.9 points, which is above the world average of 47.3. The URV was ranked in sixth position out of 25 state universities, a position it shares with the Polytechnic of Catalonia, the Complutense University of Madrid and the University of Valencia. All of these universities are ranked between 401-500 in the world because the “THE World University Rankings” does not give individual distinguish positions tos of the 99 universities that are in this range. Three Catalan universities took the leading positions in the list of best Spanish universities: the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Pompeu Fabra University and the University of Barcelona.

Phil Baty, editor of “Times Higher Education World University Rankings” states that for the Universitat Rovira i Virgili to “placed between the positions 400-500 in the world is an exceptional milestone that should be celebrated”. The 2015/2016 edition of the ranking shows that the leading positions are mostly American and British universities. The top five in the world are: California Institute of Technology , Harvard, Oxford , Stanford, Cambridge and MIT.

In the “100 under 50” ranking, carried out last April also by “Times Higher Education”, the URV was ranked the 80th position in the list of 100 best universities in the world under the age of fifty years. This ranking was published in order to show that it is possible to demonstrate excellence in a relatively short time.