TEHRAN – Two Iranian universities have been ranked among the top 100 universities in Asia, according to Webometrics Ranking of World Universities for July 2020.

The University of Tehran holds 65th place in Asia and 539th in the world. Moreover, the university is ranked 7th in west Asia.

In the continental ranking, Tehran University of Medical Sciences is the second Iranian university among the top 100, while the university ranked 12th in West Asia.

The West Asia category includes 24 universities from Iran among the top 100.

Moreover, 7 Iranian universities have been listed among best 1000 worldwide; including, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Sharif University of Technology, Tarbiat Modares University, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Isfahan University of Technology, Iran University of Science & Technology, came in 539th, 656th, 826th, 908th, 915th, 916th places, respectively. 

The "Webometrics Ranking of World Universities" is an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain. 

Since 2004, the Ranking Web (or Webometrics Ranking) is published twice a year (data is collected during the first weeks of January and July for being public at the end of both months), covering more than 27,000 Higher Education Institutions worldwide. 

Webometrics intends to motivate both institutions and scholars to have a web presence that reflects accurately their activities. If the web performance of an institution is below the expected position according to their academic excellence, university authorities should reconsider their web, open access, and transparency policy, promoting substantial increases in the volume and quality of their electronic publications.

The Webometrics Rank of a university is strongly linked to the volume and quality of the contents it publishes on the Web.

Size (number of pages) of the main web domain of the institution (presence), number of external networks (subnets) originating backlinks to the institution's webpages (impact), number of citations from top authors according to the source (openness), a and number of papers amongst the top 10% most cited in 26 disciplines (excellence) are the factors deciding universities’ ranking in Webometrics.

Harvard University, Stanford University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are the top three ranking universities worldwide in Webometrics. 

THE ranking 2020

In June, Times Higher Education (THE) Asia University Rankings 2020 ranked five Iranian universities among the top 100 universities worldwide.

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 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.

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

Leiden Ranking 2020

The Center for Science and Technology Studies Leiden Ranking has placed 36 Iranian universities in the list of over 1,000 major universities worldwide in 2020 compared with 26 universities in 2019.

The ranking is prepared based on the indicators of scientific impact and collaboration.

Leiden Ranking system, unlike other ranking systems in the world, does not calculate single rankings for universities in its system, but universities are ranked in all criteria and indicators in the Leiden system, Mohammad Javad Dehghani, head of the Islamic World Science Citation Center (ISC), said.

With the presence of 36 universities in this ranking system, Iran, as in previous years, ranks first among Islamic countries in terms of the number of top universities.

QS rankings 2021

Also, five Iranian universities have been placed among the world’s top 1,000 universities announced by the prestigious Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings 2021.

QS is the world’s leading provider of services, analytics, and insight to the global higher education sector, whose mission is to enable motivated people anywhere in the world to fulfill their potential through educational achievement, international mobility, and career development. 

The QS World University Rankings portfolio, inaugurated in 2004, has grown to become the world’s most popular source of comparative data about university performance.

Some 1,000 of the world’s top universities are ranked using six different indicators to compile QS World University Rankings 2021. Universities are evaluated according to the following six metrics: academic reputation, employer reputation, faculty/student ratio, citations per faculty, international faculty ratio, and international student ration.

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