The 2024 edition of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, one of the most prestigious to assess research-intensive universities in all of their core missions, has been published today, 28 September.

UPF appears in the 201-250 bracket in terms of the overall ranking, which analyses over 1,900 universities from 108 countries around the world, and remains among the top 110 institutions in Europe.

At the state level, UPF comes in third position (behind the University of Barcelona, in first position, and joining the Autonomous University of Barcelona in the same bracket) out of the 56 institutions in Spain to appear in the list.

A new methodology, with eighteen indicators distributed across five areas

This year, the methodology of the ranking (which to date had included thirteen indicators distributed across the areas of teaching, research, citations, international outlook, and industry income) has been significantly updated in order to provide more comprehensive and balanced comparisons between universities, trusted by students, academics, university leaders, industry and governments.

Thus, in total, this 20th edition of the list, with its new WUR 3.0 methodology, includes eighteen carefully calibrated performance indicators, which are split into five areas (as previously) some of whose names have been slightly changed: teaching, with a weighting of 29.5% of the total; research environment (29%), research quality (30%), international outlook (7.5%) and industry (4%).

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Pompeu Fabra stands out for the quality of its research

UPF, with an overall score of 55.9-58.6 points (out of 100), stands out especially in the field (pillar) of research quality (including citation impact, research strength and research excellence), in which it ranks 118th worldwide, scoring 90.5 points.

Regarding the remaining areas, for research environment (with indicators such as reputation, income and productivity), the University ranks 277th; for industry (income and patents), 284th; for international outlook (proportion of international students and staff and international co-authorship), 334th, and for teaching (learning environment), 429th.

US and British institutions lead the way

World-wide, US and British universities hold the top five positions: the University of Oxford tops the ranking for the eighth consecutive year; Stanford University rises to second place; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) comes in third position; Harvard University falls to fourth place, and the University of Cambridge falls to fifth.

This year’s ranking analyses more than 134 million citations in 16.5 million academic publications and includes survey responses by 68,402 academics worldwide. In total, it collected 411,789 data points from more than 2,673 institutions that submitted information.