Today, the European Union is presenting the second edition of the U-Multirank, a multidimensional tool for evaluating the activity of universities, created in 2014 with the aim of getting away from rankings and "closed" lists university classifications.

The particularity of the tool is that it allows users to select the parameters of their choice. For example, users can choose universities based on their size (small, medium, large); the type of degree courses they offer (undergraduate, master's, doctoral); the income they allocate to research; their origin (filtered by continent, country or region), etc. Users can choose up to 12 different indicators and the tool automatically performs the search only among the universities that meet these requirements. Then, the tool evaluates the activity of the institutions chosen based on five aspects (teaching, research, transfer, internationalization and regional engagement) and up to 31 indicators that users can also choose.

In this second edition, if you perform a search based on a broad criterion -EU universities that offer undergraduate, master's and doctoral degrees- without modifying the indicators that already appear in the tool by default, of a total of 582 universities, UPF comes in 9 ^th position in Europe, the first Spanish one, as shown in the following figure. This position means a rise of six places compared to the previous year, which is significant since the ranking has increased the number of institutions evaluated to 1,200, including public and private institutions (350 more than last year) from 82 countries around the world.

Legend:(A) Very good; (B) Good; (C) Average; (D) Below average; (E) Weak; (-) (Data unavailable); (x) (Not applicable)

Seven disciplines evaluated and different means of consultation

The ranking shows the results globally but also for a selection of subjects. Thus, in addition to the areas chosen in the first edition (Business, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Physics), the fields of Psychology, Computer Science and Medicine have been added.

Moreover, the tool allows you to see the results in three different ways. The "students" option allows locating a university in accordance with the interests of the user; the "compare" option enables seeing a comparison of two or more universities also in accordance with the interests of the user (the option used to create figure 1), and finally, the "at a glance" option allows you to see the profile of a university. Figure 2, which illustrates the results for UPF, has been created using this means.

Further information

• UPF among the Top 15 European universities according to U-Multirank, the new EU ranking
• See the U-Multirank press release (Spanish)