The University Ranking by Academic Performance (URAP) is a university ranking developed by the Informatics Institute of Middle East Technical University. Since 2010, it has been publishing annual national and global college and university rankings for top 2000 institutions. The scientometrics measurement of URAP is based on data obtained from the Institute for Scientific Information via Web of Science and inCites. For global rankings, URAP employs indicators of research performance including the number of articles, citation, total documents, article impact total, citation impact total, and international collaboration. In addition to global rankings, URAP publishes regional rankings for universities in Turkey using additional indicators such as the number of students and faculty members obtained from Center of Measuring, Selection and Placement ÖSYM.
Methodology
URAP gathers data from international bibliometric databases such as Web of Science and InCites provided by the Institute for Scientific Information. URAP uses data of 2,500 Higher Education Institutions (HEI) with highest number of articles published. The overall score of each HEI is based on its performance over several indicators. Of 2500 selected HEIs, the top 2000 are included in the rankings published by URAP. Field based rankings are performed on 23 fields based on Australia ERA.
Indicators
URAP uses 6 main indicator to measure the academic performance. These indicators are number of articles, citation, total documents, article impact total, citation impact total, and international collaboration. The raw bibliometric data underlying URAP's 6 main indicators have highly skewed distribution. To address this issue, the median of the indicators have been used. The Delphi system was conducted with a group of experts to assign weighting scores to the indicators. Total score of 600 is distributed to indicators. URAP uses additional indicators for ranking universities in Turkey including the number of students and faculty members. The following table shows the indicators used for global rankings in URAP as of 2014.
Number of articles
Number of articles is used as a measure of current scientific productivity which includes articles indexed by Web of Science. This indicator covers articles, reviews and notes. The weight of this indicator in the overall ranking is %21.
Citation
Citation, as an indicator in URAP ranking, is a measure of research impact. It is scored according to the total number of citations received. The weight of this indicator in the overall ranking is %21.
Total documents
Total documents is the measure of sustainability and continuity of scientific productivity. The total document count covers all scholarly literature provided by the Web of Science database, including conference papers, reviews, letters, discussions, scripts, and journal articles. The weight of this indicator in the overall ranking is %10.
Article Impact Total (AIT)
Article Impact Total (AIT) is a measure of scientific productivity adjusted by the ratio of institution's Citation Per Publication (CPP) to the world CPP in 23 subject areas. The ratio of the institution's CPP and the world CPP indicates whether the institution is performing above or below the world average in that field. This ratio is multiplied by the number of publications in that field and then summed across the 23 fields, as shown in the following formula:
The weight of this indicator in the overall ranking is %18.
Citation Impact Total (CIT) Citation Impact Total (CIT) is a measure of research impact corrected by the institution's normalized CPP with respect to the world CPP in 23 subject areas. The ratio of the institution's CPP and the world CPP indicates whether the institution is performing above or below the world average in that field. This ratio is multiplied by the number of citations in that field and then summed across the 23 fields, as shown in the following formula:
The weight of this indicator in the overall ranking is %15.
International collaboration
International Collaboration is a measure of global acceptance of the institution. International collaboration data, which is based on the total number of published studies conducted in collaboration with foreign universities, is obtained from InCites. The weight of this indicator in the overall ranking is %15.