According to the recently published 2015/16 edition of the QS World University Rankings, a list of 700 universities from around the world put together by the British company Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), UPF ranks 295 ^th in the world (three slots higher than in the previous edition) and has made clear improvements on two of the indicators used to calculate the ranking: international faculty and citations per faculty.

Pompeu Fabra University continues to rank sixth among Spanish universities - trailing only the University of Barcelona (166 ^th), the Autonomous University of Madrid (186 ^th), the Autonomous University of Barcelona (166 ^th), Complutense University of Madrid (226 ^th), and the University of Navarre (265 ^th) - and ranks 133 ^rd in Europe.

 The top ten slots were fairly evenly divided between universities from the US and UK (5 vs 4), with only one slot going to an institution from a country other than these two, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), which ranked ninth. The ranking is led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, the University of Cambridge, Stanford University, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of Oxford.

Improvements in citations and faculty internationalization

The ranking takes into account schools' research and teaching quality, alumni employment rates and degree of internationalization, among other things. Of the six indicators on which it is based, UPF, which earned an average score of 42.6, saw considerable improvement in its scores for international faculty ratio (80.7, up from 67.7 in the previous edition) and citations per faculty (51.4, up from 43.9 in the previous edition).

The university's scores on the other indicators remained largely stable and were as follows: academic reputation (42.4), employer reputation (31.4), international student ratio (39.8) and student-to-faculty ratio (30.3).

The ranking assigns the following relative weights to the indicators: academic reputation is worth 40%; student-to-faculty ratio and citations per faculty are worth 20% each; employer reputation is worth 10%; and international faculty ratio and international student ratio are worth 5% each. The two indices measuring reputation (academic and employer) are calculated based on a survey.

Other QS rankings include the Top 50 Under 50 Years, a ranking of the world's best young universities, on which UPF ranked 31 ^st in the 2014 edition, and the QS World University Rankings by Subject, the fifth edition of which was published this year and on which UPF ranked 23 ^rd in the world in the area of economics.

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