TEHRAN – The Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings 2024 has listed 36 Iranian universities among the world’s top 1,000 institutions, compared with 29 universities in 2023.

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2024 include 1,904 universities across 108 countries and regions.

The ranking is based on 18 carefully calibrated performance indicators that measure an institution’s performance across five areas: teaching, research environment, research quality, industry, and international outlook.

Sharif University of Technology ranks first among Iranian universities with a rank in the range of 301-350.

Amirkabir University comes next with a rank in the range of 351-400.

The University of Tehran and Iran University of Science and Technology both are in the range of 401-500.

Shahid Beheshti Medical University, Tehran Medical University, and Iran Medical University are in the range of 601-800.

This year’s ranking analyzed over 134 million citations across 16.5 million research publications and included survey responses from 68,402 scholars globally. Overall, it collected 411,789 data points from more than 2,673 institutions that submitted data.

Oxford University is at the top of this ranking for the eighth year in a row.

The highest new entry in this ranking is the Catholic University of Italy, which is ranked 301-350. However, most of the institutions joining the rankings for the first time this year are in Asia.

The United States is the most represented country with 169 institutions, as well as the most represented among the top 200 institutions, with 56 universities.

India, with 91 institutions of higher education, is currently the fourth most represented country and has surpassed China (86).

Four countries entered this ranking for the first time, all of them in Europe. The addition of Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, and Armenia is contrary to last year's trend, which has caused these countries to be represented in the ranking of the world's top universities.

In addition to the 1,904 ranked institutions, an additional 769 universities are listed with "reporter" status, meaning they submitted data but did not meet the eligibility criteria to receive a rank and agreed to appear as reporters in the final table.

The world's top ten universities in 2024 are as follows:

University of Oxford, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, University of Cambridge, California Institute of Technology, Imperial College London, University of California, Berkeley, and Yale University.

Academic rankings 2023

Multiple organizations annually rank universities around the world based on different criteria.

According to an early release from the 2023 edition of the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) Global Innovation Index (GII), Tehran ranks 34th among the top 100 Science and Technology (S&T) clusters in the world.

In September, Iranian higher education institutions once again demonstrated their global prominence, with 18 universities making their mark in the prestigious "Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities," also known as the "Taiwan Ranking," released annually by the National Taiwan University.

The University of Tehran has emerged as the torchbearer of Iranian academia, securing an impressive global ranking of 286 in the 2023 Taiwan Ranking. This distinction cements the University of Tehran's reputation as a world-class institution committed to research excellence.

In August, the second edition of the Webometrics ranking 2023 of the World Universities ranked 440 Iranian institutions among 30,000 top universities worldwide.

Tehran University, ranked 305 in the world, is the top among Iranian institutions on the list followed by Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences.

The first edition of the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities 2023, in June, ranked 457 Iranian institutions among around 32,000 top universities across the world.

Universities (ARWU), also known as Shanghai Ranking, placed ten universities from Iran among the top 1000 universities in the world in the Shanghai Ranking, 2023, according to the head of the Islamic World Science Citation Center (ISC).              

The University of Tehran is among the top 500 universities in the world with a rank of 401-500, the best among Iranian universities, the ISC head Ahmad Fazelzadeh said, IRIB reported.

In the 2023 edition of the Times Higher Education Young University Rankings which includes 605 universities, Iran became the third most represented nation with 39 institutions.

The latest edition of the QS World University Rankings placed seven Iranian universities among the world’s top institutes.

The Leiden ranking system published the 2023 report, according to which 46 Iranian universities were among the 1,411 top universities in the world. Among Islamic countries, Iran ranked first, followed by Turkey and Egypt with 36 and 13 universities, respectively.

In the 2023 edition of the Times Higher Education’s Asian University Ranking System, 669 institutions from 31 Asian countries are included and 65 Iranian universities are among the top Asian institutions.

MT/MG