Pompeu Fabra University has managed to position nine of the 22 disciplines evaluated among the best in the world in the fifth edition of the rankings by subject published by QS annually since 2011.

Thus, studies in Accounting and Finance, Communication and Media Studies, Law, Economics and Econometrics, Linguistics, Politics and International Studies are joined in this edition by studies in Modern Languages, Biology and Medicine (the last two in the 301-350 bracket). In fact, traditionally, the QS ranking by subjects only incorporated the top 200 universities in the world for each field, but in 2015, those responsible for the ranking have extended the universities present in some disciplines up to 400, arguing that they are areas with a "greater volume".

By disciplines, it is worth highlighting the results of the studies in Economics and Econometrics at UPF, which rise to 23 ^rd in the world, sixth in Europe (second if only the universities of continental Europe are considered) and first in Spain.

Table 1 shows the evolution of the different disciplines at UPF in the ranking in the last three years .

QS began to compile rankings by subject in 2011 and since then, has increased the number of disciplines evaluated to the thirty six of today. In the 2015 edition, more than 3,500 universities have been evaluated of which only about 900 appear in the ranking. To perform out this ranking, QS basically uses three types of data: the evaluations of academics and employers (collected from reputation surveys), and data from Scopus to calculate the number of citations of each researcher, where an index is applied to allow quantifying the scientific output and impact of the articles of a researcher.