UCT leading African university in all five major rankings
19 August 2019
The University of Cape Town(UCT) took the top spot in the continent and jumped back up into the 201-300 band worldwide in the latest Shanghai Ranking’s Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) 2019.
The best 1000 universities in the world were published through the ARWU. UCT now leads in Africa in all of the five major world university rankings: Times Higher Education, Quaquarelli Symonds, Centre for World University Rankings, US News Best Global Universities and ARWU.
UCT has been ranked in ARWU’s 201-300 band since 2003 except for the last two years: 2017 and 2018. This drop to the 301-400 band was mainly a result of having no UCT researchers on the Clarivate Analytics list of highly cited researchers (consisting of the top 1% of cited publications per year and per research area on the Web of Science from 2006-2016) which had resulted in a zero score for this indicator.
This year, UCT regained the top score in the country in the highly cited researchers indicator which contributes 20% of the total weighting, as three UCT researchers were included in the list: professors Eric Bateman, William Bond and Dan Stein.
Professor Sue Harrison, UCT Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Internationalisation, commented: “We are extremely pleased to be leading in Africa. This speaks to the impact and quality of our cutting-edge research. Our performance in teaching and learning is further recognition of the excellent calibre of our academics. They are critical to UCT’s goal to contribute to the knowledge economy of the country and the continent.”
UCT also achieved the highest scores in South Africa in all of the research performance indicators.
The ARWU measures academic and research performance based on six indicators with weightings: alumni winning selected Nobel Prizes and Field Medals (10%), staff winning selected Nobel Prizes and Field Medals (20%), highly cited researchers (20%), papers published in Nature and Science (20%), papers indexed in major citation indices (20%) and the per capita academic performance of an institution (10%).
Issued by Nombuso Shabalala, Head: Media Liaison, Communication and Marketing Department, University of Cape Town, 19 August 2019
