Times Higher Education (THE) has just presented the 2015-2016 edition of the World University Rankings, one of the most prestigious and most internationally acclaimed. In this edition, UPF has risen one place with respect to last year (from 165 ^th to 164 ^th), and ranks as the second Spanish University in the list and 79 ^th in Europe.

This annual ranking (now in its twelfth edition and extended to 800 institutions) is drawn from a combination of 13 indicators corresponding to five major areas, weighted as follows:  Teaching (30%), Research (30%), Internationalization (7.5%), Transfer (2.5%) and Citations (30%).

UPF improves in most indicators

Compared to the scores UPF obtained last year in each of these indicators, it has improved in four of the five items (except Research, falling slightly), as well as the overall score, which increases from 48.1 to 51.2.

The most noteworthy indicators are Teaching, increasing from 25.1 to 32.9; Citations (which measures the impact of publications, and therefore, the influence of the research of each institution), which has gone from 83.3 to 90.7 and is, by far, the University's most outstanding indicator. The Internationalization indicator remains high, above 63.

Continued Anglo-Saxon domination

The 2015-2016 edition of the THE ranking shows, once again, the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon universities.  The top ten positions are held by the following universities: California Institute of Technology, Oxford, Stanford, Cambridge, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Imperial College London, ETH Zurich-Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and University of Chicago.

A total of 25 Spanish universities appear in the ranking. Among the top two hundred institutions we can find the Autonomous University of Barcelona, in 146 ^th; UPF (164 ^th) and the University of Barcelona (174 ^th). In the 301 to 350 bracket are the Autonomous University of Madrid and the University of Navarra, while the Complutense University of Madrid, the Polytechnic of Catalonia, Rovira i Virgili and Valencia are between 401 and 500.

Different orientations of the prestigious rankings

The ranking of THE, like the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), although they consider teaching, focus on research and on the reputation of the institutions. There are some clearly research-oriented rankings (Leiden or Scimago); the Academic Ranking of World Universities (better known as the Shanghai ranking), gives great importance to indicators such as the number of former students who have a Nobel Prize. 

Others look to move away from the closed rankings of universities and prioritize the user drawing up their own list, on the basis of the indicators they choose (this is the case of the U-Multirank promoted by the European Union; or the U-ranking, its Spanish counterpart promoted by the IVIE and the BBVA Foundation). Within the Spanish State, there are also notable initiatives such as the ranking of the CyD Foundation.

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>  UPF remains the only Spanish University among the Top 200 of the Times Higher Education ranking