UCD has been ranked as the best university in Ireland according to U.S News and World Report’s Best Global Universities Ranking list for the second consecutive year. UCD also ranked as the 97th best university in Europe and 226th best university in the world.
The Belfield-based university status has improved from previous years as they were 227th in the world in 2019 and 231st in 2018. The university also ascended five places in the European category as it was placed 102nd in 2019. UCD is now the only Irish university listed in the top 100 European Universities.
UCD also scored well in the subject ranking as they are ranked 24th in the world for agricultural sciences, 139th for business and economics and 160th in arts and humanities. This is the seventh year that the US News and World Report has published the ‘Best Global University Rankings’, which includes over 1,500 universities from across 86 countries.
To evaluate the world’s universities, US News and World Report explained that they first create a “pool of 1,748 universities” from those mentioned in the Clarivate Global Reputation survey. After reviewing the survey, universities are then filtered by their published work. If the university has not published a minimum of 1,250 papers within the given timeframe (2014-2018) then they are rejected from the report.
The chosen schools are then subdivided into thirteen sub-categories that measure their global research performance. Each category is weighted differently with ‘global research reputation’, ‘regional research reputation’ and ‘number of publications among the 10% most cited’ carrying the most weight in the ranking at 12.5% each. Categories such as ‘books’ and ‘conferences’ carried the least amount of weight at only 2.5% each. Once all of these categories are accounted for, they combine to what is referred to as a global score which is how the universities are definitively ranked.
According to the report, the best universities in the world are Harvard University with a global score of 100, Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a score of 97.9 and Stanford University in third place with a score of 95.3. UCD obtained a global score of 61.2 and scored highest in the ‘international collaboration’ category, placing 100th in the world.
Sarah Connaughton – Reporter
