Four African universities are among the top 500, according to China’s Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) survey, released this month.
Egypt’s Cairo University is “back to the top 500 after five years of staggering outside,” said a statement from the Shanghai Jiatong University, where ARWU is based.
The other three universities are South African: the University of Cape Town, the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) and the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits).
The ARWU rankings rely on six indicators, including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields medals for mathematics, to rate more than 1,000 universities worldwide.
Another ARWU criteria is the number of highly-cited researchers selected by Thomson Reuters’s influential Web of Science, which includes over 10,000 high-impact journals from across the globe.
The number of articles appearing in the expanded Science Citation Index and the Social Sciences Citation Index is another measure by which the universities are assessed by ARWU.
The Shanghai rankings consider the number of articles published in the journals Nature and Science as one of its six key indicators.
Finally, the per capita performance with respect to the size of an institution is the last indicator used by ARWU.
These indicators make for little year-on-year change but the ranking’s stability is respected, according to a report in University World News.
See ‘‘Debate over South African university rankings’’ and ‘‘University of Cairo returns to top 500’’ elsewhere in this issue for more on the Shanghai rankings.
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