This is the first time the Universitat Rovira i Virgili appears on the ranking of the top 500 universities in the world by the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), an internationally prestigious ranking compiled by the Jiao Tong University of Shanghai

For the first time the Universitat Rovira i Virgili has been placed among the top 500 universities in the world according to the ranking by the Jiao Tong University of Shanghai, which evaluates the reputation and research production of higher education institutions. The University is has been placed between the positions 401 to 500, in the section as the University of the Basque Country and the Universitat de València. A total of twelve Spanish universities (five of which are Catalan and headed by the Universitat de Barcelona) are in the internationally recognised ranking.

Harvard heads the ranking for the 14th consecutive year, followed by Stanford, Berkeley, Cambridge and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The list principally takes into account research production and uses data such as the number of publications in international scientific journals, the number of graduates or academics who have received Nobel prizes or a Fields medal (for major contributions to mathematics), the number of articles produced in relation to the number of staff at the institution, and the number of citations by researchers from other institutions.

Previously the URV had never appeared in the general Shanghai ranking, although it has appeared in the individual discipline rankings, where it was among the top 150 in the world for computer sciences and the top 200 for chemistry. This year rankings have been published for engineering and the URV appears in two of the seven categories. It is ranked 201-300 for environmental sciences and engineering and 401-600 for materials science and engineering.

More information and the full ranking can be found here.