•Notícia

The first edition of the U.S. News Best Global Universities Rankings has recently been published. The UPC is ranked 409th in the global ranking (in the 409-414 range), 174th in Europe (in the 174-180 range) and 8th in Spain (in the 8-9 range), where it is also the top technical university.

The UPC is the best university in Spain in two classifications by subject: Computer Science, in which it is ranked 37th in the world, and Engineering, in which it is ranked 38th. It is the only Spanish university to classify in Engineering.

The UPC's profile can be consulted on this web page.
U.S. News & World Report has been publishing rankings of North American universities for over 30 years. In this year's edition, it has extended its analysis to include the 500 best universities in the world. Its rankings cover 49 countries. It also publishes four rankings by region, covering Europe, Asia, Australia/New Zealand and Latin America, and 11 further rankings by country, including Spain. The Spanish universities that appear in the general ranking can be consulted on this web page. 

The handling and use of data was entrusted to Thomson Reuters, which also manages the THE ranking, as well as Web of Science and other reference databases for analysing scientific output worldwide.

For the general ranking, the institution published the top 500 universities after analysing an initial selection of 750 universities on the basis of data published in Thomson Reuters InCites. For the final classification, several indicators were analysed. The indicators are linked to reputation for research at global and regional levels and they take into account the results of the last five years of the Academic Reputation Survey by Thomson Reuters.

Bibliometric indicators were considered, using the Web of Science database as a reference. In addition to scientific productivity, the classification took into account the normalised impact, the total number of citations, the number of highly cited publications and international collaboration. Although for the bibliometric indicators the editors considered the period 2008-2012, for citations they considered the entire time range, from the date of publication up to April 2014, when the data were compiled.

As educational indicators the editors also took into account the number of doctoral degrees awarded by a given institution in 2012 and the ratio of doctoral degrees awarded to the number of teaching and research staff.

Different weightings are applied to the position of each institution in the overall ranking and in the subject ranking.

In the classification by subject, the ranking positions the 100 best higher education institutions in the world in the following 21 subject areas: Biology and Biochemistry; Molecular Biology and Genetics; Agricultural Sciences; Space Science; Computer Science; Behavioural Sciences and Neuroscience; Plant and Animal Science; Materials Science; Social Sciences and Public Health; Ecology and the Environment; Economics and Business; Engineering; Pharmacology and Toxicology; Physics; Geosciences; Immunology; Mathematics; Clinical Medicine; Microbiology; Psychology and Psychiatry; and Chemistry.

The methodology used in these rankings takes into account reputation and bibliometric indicators, analysed by subject. In this case, the 100 best universities in the world are obtained by applying the indicators to a preliminary selection by the editors of the 250 higher education institutions with the greatest number of publications in each of the 21 subject areas.