The BBVA Foundation and the Valencian Institute of Economic Research (Ivie) have published the third edition of U-ranking, which assesses the teaching, research and innovation activities of Spanish universities.

For the third time in a row, UPF is the most productive university in the State in an edition that also includes private universities. By activities, UPF ranks second in productivity in teaching, third in research, and fourth in innovation and technological development. The following table shows the classification of the five best Spanish universities according to their productivity on a global scale, also including their position in the three aspects evaluated.

A marked difference in performance between universities and communities

The report attributes "big" differences in performance between universities, highlighting that the most efficient achieve "double the productivity" of the less active ones. The report also notes that although the public system has maintained the standards of productivity in previous years, the volume of results of one third of public universities has slightly decreased attributing this to the "cutbacks suffered in human and financial resources, especially for research and innovation activities".

The report also points out differences between higher education systems. Thus, the Catalan universities would be the most productive, achieving a larger volume of results with equal resources used, followed by the universities of Navarra, Cantabria, the Community of Valencia, Madrid and the Balearic Islands. Finally, this third edition of the ranking confirms the relevance of knowledge production of the metropolitan areas of Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia. The graph b elow shows the results by autonomous communities.

Work of reference

• U-ranking project. ISSUE 2015 rankings - Synthetic indicators of Spanish universities