JEDDAH: Of Saudi Arabia’s 28 government universities, only one could make to the list of top 500 universities recently released by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. This was King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, which was in the 251-300 ranks.
King Saud University in Riyadh and King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals in Dhahran were both ranked between 501 and 600 positions on the list.
The universities of the United States, Britain and Switzerland shared the top 10 ranks on the list with six American universities figuring on the top of the list with California Institute of Technology in the lead of the country’s universities, followed by the two British universities — Oxford and Cambridge — while the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich ranked ninth globally.
According to the Times Higher Education (THE) website, the rankings are based on data provided by each university, which its team of experts evaluate against 13 separate performance indicators, covering the full range of a top university’s essential areas of activity: research; interaction with business; international outlook, and the teaching environment.
For the 2015-2016 rankings, THE’s data team drew on a database of more than 100,000 data points from 1,200 universities from 88 countries, the site said.
It said it employed a “global Academic Reputation Survey of 10,500 leading scholars from around the world,” who provided their expert views on the world’s leading universities, “and an additional 400,000 data points on institutions’ academic reputation by country and by subject.”
“In addition, we also analysed 51 million citations to 11.3 million academic journal articles (from Elsevier’s Scopus database) published over a five-year period between 2010 and 2014,” it said.
The rankings can be accessed at https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings.
