TEHRAN – Five Iranian universities were ranked among the top 100 universities of Times Higher Education (THE) Asia University Rankings 2020, ISNA reported on Monday.

The Times Higher Education Asia University Rankings 2020 use the same 13 performance indicators as THE World University Rankings, but they are recalibrated to reflect the attributes of Asia’s institutions.

The universities are judged across all their core missions – teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook – to provide the most comprehensive and balanced comparisons available. China is home to the continent’s top two universities for the first time this year, as Tsinghua University holds on to first place and Peking University climbs three places to second.

Meanwhile, Japan is once again the most-represented nation in the list with 110 institutions, up from 103 last years.

Elsewhere, Macau University of Science and Technology is the top new entry in the table, debuting at 32nd place.

The 2020 ranking includes just under 500 universities from 30 territories.

Mohammad Javad Dehghani, head of the Islamic World Science Citation Center (ISC), said that there are 40 universities from Iran, including the Noshirvani University of Technology in Babol, Sharif University of Technology, and the Amirkabir University of Technology, ranked the three top universities of Iran.

The number of Iranian universities has risen from 29 in the Asian Times 2019 rankings to 40 in 2020 (the number of universities in the ranking has risen from 417 to 489). In 2019, four universities in the country ranked below 100 in Asia, while in 2020 this number reached five. However, Iran's best ranking in 2019 was 43rd, but this ranking rose to 48th in 2020, he explained.

In 2020, Iran had 40 universities among the top Asian universities, which was 29 in 2019, 18 in 2018, and 14 universities in 2017, he highlighted.

Although Iran has grown significantly in terms of the number of universities compared to the previous years, the growth in terms of rank is seen in only a number of universities, including Sharif University of Technology, University of Science and Technology, Tehran Medical Sciences, Mashhad Medical Sciences, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University.

FB/MG