PRE-DEGREE/CERTIFICATE REGISTRATION/SCHOOL FEES
URAP Rates UniPort 3rd In Nigeria, 50th In Africa
- Details
- Published: 18 November 2016
More cheering news came the way of the University of Port Harcourt last week, following it being ranked among the topmost league of Nigeria’s higher institutions. In its latest performance evaluation of higher institutions around the world, the University Ranking for Academic Performance (URAP), ranked the University of Port Harcourt 3rd in Africa and 50th on the African continent in its 2016/2017 exercise. Also, the University is currently ranks 1, 749th in the world.
The URAP, which published the latest rankings on its website at:www.urapcentre.com, based its rating on the available 6, 751 internationally verifiable research publications by staff of the University of Port Harcourt based on a special 803 webpages for researchers in the institution developed by the Academic Planning, Research and Control Unit of the Vice-Chancellor’s Office.
Acting Director of Academic Planning, Dr. Peter Kpolovie, who made the information available to a UniPort Weekly Correspondent, disclosed that the URAP World Ranking was based on seven research productivity indicators. He named the indicators to include: presence on the web, impact, openness, excellence, visibility, scholarly publications online and citations per faculty. In his own words: “Any ranking of universities henceforth, particularly in 2017 that uses the same parameters, will certainly rank the University of Port Harcourt much better.”
Describing URAP as an academic performance-based ranking exercise, Dr. Kpolovie said that publications constituted the basis for the ranking methodology used in arriving at the latest ranking of universities around the world. “The rankings take into account both the quality and quantity of publications by scholars in universities and international research collaboration criteria used to judge performance indicators,” the Acting Director further explained.
Further inquiries by our Correspondent indicated that URAP gathered data from 2, 500 Higher Education Institutes based on which it ranked the affected universities on the basis of their academic performance, while the overall score of each institution was predicated on six academic performance indicators, namely: article, citations, total document, article impact total, citation impact total, including international collaborations.
Following the evaluation of data from 2, 000 of the institutions that participated in the exercise, URAP rated UniPort 3rd in Nigeria with a total of 124.60 points, behind the Universities of Ibadan with 238.77 and University of Nigeria, Nsukka with 124.65 points, respectively.
Apart from the Cairo University that snatched 4th position, the latest rankings show that universities in South Africa continue to dominate the first three positions on the academic league table. South African universities also took fifth, sixth, eight, twelfth, thirteenth, eighteenth and twentieth positions, respectively.The six academic performance indicators are based on the criteria developed by the International Ranking Expert Group (IREG), which was multiplied by the number of publications in each field and then summed up across the 41 fields evaluated by URAP.
The indicators were aimed at balancing each institution’s scientific productivity with the ‘field normalised impact’ generated by those publications in each field. For the 2016/2017 exercise, URAP World Ranking bibliometric data was obtained through the Thomson Reuters’ InCites research analytics service, which provided an interface to the Web of Science database.
The 41 subject areas used in the rankings were based on the discipline classification matrix developed by the Australian Research Council for journals indexed in the Web of Science.
