U of T ranks fourth globally in a recent NTU Rankings list
Ranked among 1,200 institutions, U of T places fourth after Harvard University, Stanford University and University College London.
On September 1, the National Taiwan University (NTU) released its yearly World University Rankings List, placing the University of Toronto (U of T) fourth overall among 1,200 globally featured institutions.
First released in 2007, the NTU Rankings, also known as the “Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities,” was developed by a research team led by professor of library and information science at NTU, Dr. Mu-Hsuan Huang. The NTU Rankings were initially co-hosted by NTU and the Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan until it transitioned to its own in 2012.
The rankings are based on the research productivity and impact of institutions’ scientific papers. This year, Harvard University took the top spot, followed by Stanford University, University College London, and U of T.
Institutions are ranked according to six categories—agriculture, engineering, life sciences, medicine, natural sciences, and social sciences—and divided into 27 subfields, such as agricultural sciences, civil engineering, and immunology. This year, U of T placed in the top 10 in subfields including biology & biochemistry, clinical medicine, neuroscience & behaviour, psychiatry/psychology, and general social sciences.
U of T was the highest-ranked Canadian university and was joined by the University of British Columbia and McGill University in the list’s top 100. The University of Alberta, McMaster University, Université de Montréal, and the University of Calgary placed among the top 200 institutions.
In the ranking’s knowledge categories, U of T ranked high in medicine, social sciences, and life sciences, scoring second, third, and twelfth respectively.
Compared to last year’s rankings, U of T improved three places in the social sciences category from sixth to third, and improved one place in the overall category from fifth to fourth.
To calculate the rankings, NTU scores universities based on eight specific indicators which fall under three factors: research productivity, research impact and research excellence.
Research productivity is the total research output of universities while research impact is determined by the number of times other research papers cite papers produced by a given university. Research excellence is measured by the h-index, a ranking system which measures the quantity and quality of institutions’ papers, as well as the frequency of highly-cited research and its presence in reputable journals.
In weighting the final score, research productivity, impact, and excellence make up 25 per cent, 35 per cent, and 40 per cent respectively.
The methodology behind NTU Rankings
NTU uses the Web of Science (WoS) platform by the analytics company Clarivate to compile the overall citation list. WoS comprises a wide variety of papers from around the world, thereby reducing any potential for regional biases.
According to Clarivate, WoS consists of over 2.5 billion cited references. Of these references, NTU mainly uses the papers from the Science Citation Index Expanded and the Social Sciences Citation Index of WoS to determine the total quantitative research output of universities.
NTU also uses the Essential Science Indicators database by Clarivate to determine highly cited papers. Clarivate defines highly cited papers as its database’s top one per cent of cited papers.
NTU also determines high-impact journals in its research excellence category through Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports, which compiles a list of reputable journals utilizing the WoS Core Collection’s criteria for journals, which bases reputability on “objectivity, selectivity, and collection dynamics.”
Securing high rankings is not new for U of T as the university performed well in previous editions of the NTU Rankings. Past editions reveal that the university has placed among the overall list’s top 10 institutions since it first appeared on the overall rankings and achieved respectable positions in the knowledge fields of medicine, social sciences, and life sciences.
Overall, the latest NTU Rankings highlight U of T’s continued excellence in research and education, reinforcing its status as a leading institution on the global stage.
