UPF is present in two of the main international rankings published recently: on the one hand, the  QS World University Rankings 2021, in which it remains among the top 300 universities in the world, and secondly, in the U-Multirank, promoted by the European Union as an open list to assess the activity of the universities according to the user’s criteria.

In the U-Multirank, where UPF stands out for research and international orientation, and after falling from 23^rd position in last year’s edition, this year the University has returned to the European top ten (it was fifth in 2018), climbing to seventh place.

UPF in a stable position since 2014 in the top 300 of the QS ranking

Pompeu Fabra University remains among the top 300 in the QS World University Rankings 2021, which includes the 1,600 best universities in the world.

Despite dropping two positions compared to last year both globally (from 285 to 287) and in Europe (from 120 to 122), since 2014 UPF has remained fairly stable among these first 300 institutions, between 281^st and 289^th.

According to the seventeenth edition of this ranking, produced by the international higher education consultant QS Quacquarelli Symonds, UPF remains sixth in Spain, behind the universities of Barcelona, the Autonomous University of Madrid, the Complutense of Madrid, the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the University of Navarra.

On a European level, the first institutions to appear on the list are the universities of Oxford, ETH Zurich and Cambridge in 5^th, 6^th and 7^th places, respectively, while globally the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) leads the list for the ninth consecutive year, followed, like last year, by Stanford and Harvard.

The QS ranking puts UPF among the world’s top 125 for citations

As in the previous edition, UPF tops the indicator in Spain for the number of citations received by its researchers’ articles and climbs to 124^th in the overall ranking, improving 54 places. This indicator measures the average number of citations received by articles written by the lecturers of an institution and serves to assess the quality and impact of the scientific work carried out by the universities. UPF also stands out for the percentage of  international faculty, for which it comes in 286^th place.

Out of a maximum of 100 points, the University has obtained an average of 34.8 (slightly lower than last year when it scored 35) among the six indicators that make up the ranking: academic reputation (31.4), number of citations (61.4), ratio between teachers and students (12.7), reputation of employers (28.7), percentage of international teaching staff (63.6), and percentage of international students (22.6).

The highest weighted indicator is academic reputation (40%), followed by the number of citations and the ratio between teachers and students (both 20%), employer reputation (10%) and percentage of international faculty and international students (both 5%).

Pompeu Fabra University, seventh best university in Europe in the U-Multirank

U-Multirank has published the results of the seventh edition of its ranking (2020), which evaluates nearly 1,800 universities from 96 countries around the world, including more than 5,153 faculties, 11,800 study programmes in 28 subject areas.

In the list of the best European universities, from a total of 1,070 institutions, UPF comes seventh, and first for Spain. This European list is headed by Télécom Paris, Montpellier SupAgro and King’s College London. It is a proposed classification within the U-Multirank with predetermined criteria, although this is not the main purpose of the classification.

The ranking includes five dimensions related with university activities: Teaching and Learning, Research, International Orientation, Regional Engagement, and Knowledge Transfer. It compares the performance of the institutions through a series of indicators and classifies them in a ranking ranging from “A” (very good) to “E” (weak).

From a selection of the ten most important indicators (two for each dimension), UPF gets an A for the two indicators related to research (citations and impact of publications, size-normalized), the two in international orientation (student mobility and international joint publications), and for the two of regional engagement (graduates working in the region and joint publications with regional stakeholders).

Looking at all 36 indicators, UPF scores an “A” for fifteen (five for research, four for international orientation, three for regional engagement, two for knowledge transfer and one for teaching and learning), a “B” for eight, a “C” for two, a “D” for three, and for 8 it is either not evaluable or not applicable.

The ranking includes an interactive map, showing the 100 highest performing universities with the best results in the five dimensions. UPF is the only Spanish university to appear when taking into account the aggregate (overall) score. It stands out for research (also the only institution in Spain to appear) and for international orientation (from Spain, in addition to UPF is the ESIC Business & Marketing School of Madrid and Carlos III University of Madrid).

U-Multirank, a personalized ranking based on a multidimensional approach

The user, from a multidimensional approach, can compose their own ranking based on the various indicators and dimensions. It is also possible to assess the activity of the universities as a whole or choose a specific discipline. Thus, the list enables identifying the strengths and the weaknesses of the institutions, in connection with the aspects of greatest interest.

This year, the information includes aspects related to the digitization of bachelor’s degree programmes.

This year, the information includes aspects related to the digitization of bachelor’s degree programmes, a key area following COVID-19, and how universities have been able to adapt to the strategy of teaching online.

The data included in U-Multirank come from various sources: supplied by the institutions themselves, taken from bibliometric databases and international patents; from national databases; and from surveys on more than 100,000 students from the participating universities.

This project was conceived by the European Commission as a tool to evaluate universities’ activities on the basis of the criteria of the user, moving away from traditional “closed” rankings.