The best university in Spain for research quality is Pompeu Fabra. It is ranked 107th in the world, the first of the Spanish universities and immediately ahead of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (108th), the University of California in the United States (115th) and Bristol University in England (118th).
These are the results of a world ranking exercise that has evaluated 1,290 universities from all over the world. The study was carried out by Spanish firm SCImago Research Group using the Netherlands-based Scopus database and published in the magazine Magisterio in April. It was presented a few days ago at the headquarters of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid. The Spanish and world rankings can be consulted online at MAGISnet.
The leading places in the world league table are occupied by some of the most prestigious universities in the United States with New York's Rockefeller University at the top. Taking into account only the classification obtained by Spanish universities, the Catalan universities, five of which are among the top ten in Spain, come out of the exercise very well.
The articles by UPF researchers, among the most quoted
The methodology employed by SCImago used the Crown indicator, a bibliometric indicator that measures normalised citation impact. The study calculated the number of documents produced by each institution and the impact achieved, bearing in mind the size of each university.
The Crown indicator developed by SCImago takes into account the average number of citations obtained by similar documents within a given time period, in this case between 2003 and 2007. According to this indicator, the UPF obtained a score of 1.89, meaning that its scientific output was cited 89 per cent more times. The average number of citations per document was 6.19, the highest of all the universities in Spain .
Unlike other classifications, the ranking drawn up by SCImago is based on the number of citations -or the number of times a given article is mentioned in works by other authors- obtained by the documents produced by universities all over the world. The world ranking includes the universities that published more than 1,000 documents in the five years between 2003 and 2007. This restriction meant that 43 Spanish universities were included in the ranking, all of them state-run, except one.