U-Multirank releases third global university rankings: US research dominance hides diverse strengths in global higher education

Monday 4 April: Today U-Multirank, the largest global university ranking, has published its latest release of data online (www.umultirank.org), revealing that, while American universities continue to dominate research performance, the picture is far more diverse when it comes to teaching and other strengths.
The third annual edition of U-Multirank is the largest since its launch in 2014 featuring over 1,300 universities, from more than 90 countries, with more than 3,250 faculties and 10,700 study programmes. It includes over 27,000 performance scores at an institutional level alone and another 66,000 in 13 subject areas, many of which are included for the first time.
Among the wealth of data published today is a set of 10 performance lists, each showing 25 top-performing universities according to a different U-Multirank indicator. These paint a picture of great diversity among high performers and show that the long-held esteem for American universities relies on a particularly narrow view of the purpose of higher education.
The results, which are exclusive to U-Multirank, look at performance indicators ranging from staff-student ratios in teaching to citation rates for research publications.
The 'top cited publications' indicator is just one measure of research excellence and it is dominated by 18 US universities out of the 25 top performers. In particular Rockefeller University, MIT, Stanford and Harvard outperformed the rest of the world. There are only 6 European universities in this specific list: one from Finland, two from France, one from Switzerland and two from the UK. For the largest volume of research publications, the picture is similar: 12 US universities, and only five European (four UK and one from France), five Asian, two Canadian and one from Brazil.
The situation is reversed, however, for 'co-publications with industrial partners', a key measure of 'knowledge transfer'. In this indicator 17 out of the 25 top performers are from Europe, including many technical universities and universities of applied sciences, such as the top three performers: Reutlingen UAS, Nuremberg IoT and Munich UAS - all from Germany.
For interdisciplinary publications, both European (12) and Asian (11) universities outperform US institutions (only 1). And the top 25 university performers on the indicator 'regional joint publications' indicates that 21 European universities have a strong publishing culture with organisations in their own region, while not a single US university is on this list.
Thus, universities' role as global centres of excellence is reflected in many measures, not only of research but also of teaching and learning, knowledge transfer, internationalisation and regional engagement.
The U-Multirank lists make it clear that top performance is for instance also found in 'student mobility' where patterns of strength are not geographic at all. The list of top performers here is dominated by business schools. And some of the best student-staff ratios, which are often regarded as more supportive to students' learning, are found in a number of European countries (Belgium, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain) as well as in Brazil and Japan.