"Times Higher Education" (THE) has published its ranking of the best universities in the world. As in the previous ranking, the URV has been placed between the positions 401 and 500 out of the 980 universities that are included in the ranking. It is the same position that the URV achieved in the Shanghai ranking, in which it has been included for the first time this year

The latest edition of the ranking was published on 21 September and places the URV once again among the top 500 universities in the world. The “THE World University Ranking” establishes standards for the core activities of a global research university and is based on a combination of thirteen indicators from five main ambits that are weighted as follows: teaching (30%), research (30%), citations (30%), international outlook (7.5%) and transfer (2.5%). These indicators are used to compare more than one thousand universities around the world, 980 of which have ended up in the ranking.

The URV’s best score is for citations (i.e. the impact of its researchers’ publications), for which it was awarded 72.1 punts. This ambit evaluates research impact by calculating the number of times a publication is cited by other researchers around the world. The URV has improved its scores for last year in all of the five main ambits.

The University is in seventh place out of the 27 Spanish universities that appear on the ranking, a position it shares with the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Both are ranked between 401 and 500 in the world because “THE World University Rankings” does not give specific numerical positions to the 100 universities in this section. Three Catalan universities head the list of the best universities in Spain: the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and the Universitat de Barcelona.

The 2016-2017 edition of the ranking highlights the dominance of American and British universities. The top five positions are occupied by University of Oxford, California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Stanford University, the University of Cambridge and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). During the presentation of the ranking, Phil Baty, the ranking’s editor emphasised the continuing rise of Asian universities.

Last April THE’s 150 under 50 ranking placed the URV in 83rd position on the list of the top 150 universities in the world under the age of 50. The purpose of this ranking is to highlight the levels of excellence achieved in a relatively short period of time.