The University of the Philippines (UP) continues to be in the league of the best universities in the world, according to the 2021 Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE-WUR).
UP ranked fifth among noted universities in Southeast Asia (SEA) which are National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), University of Malaya, and the University of Brunei Darussalam.
The country’s premiere educational institution also retains its spot in the roster of the top 500 universities in the world. According to the THE-WUR, UP remains in the 401-500 bracket, after being assessed alongside 1,527 research-intensive universities.
UP garnered its highest score in the criterion of citations or global research influence, which accounts for 30% of its total score. THE-WUR comes out with the citation score by capturing the average number of times a university’s published work is cited by scholars globally.
This year, bibliometric data supplier Elsevier examined 86 million citations from 2015-2020 across 13.6 million journal articles, article reviews, conference proceedings, books and book chapters published from 2015-2019.
According to the THE, citations are a way of measuring a university’s role in spreading new knowledge and ideas and its contribution to the sum of human knowledge.
The other performance indicators are grouped into the areas of teaching (30%), research (30%), international outlook (7.5%), and industry income (2.5%).
UP Assistant Vice President for Academic Affairs Carla Dimalanta noted that UP outranks universities in neighboring countries in terms of research citation. Its score of 86.7 outperforms the 81.5 of NUS and the 83 of NTU, the top two ranking universities in the ASEAN region. Singapore’s NUS and NTU are ranked 25 and 47, respectively, in the World University Rankings.
UP is the first Philippine university to figure in the THE-WUR and the only one to break into its top 500.