Riga Technical University has improved its performance in several criteria of the Times Higher Education World University Ranking 2019. This rating includes the very best universities in the world, evaluating their performance in studies, collaboration with industry, internationalization, as well as in science and citation.
«Compared to the previous year, assessment of RTU has significantly increased this year. RTU results have improved in four of the five key evaluation criteria. It is important to highlight the rise in science and research related indicators and the high ranking of our cooperation with the industry – according to this criterion, we rank among the 300 best universities in the world,» said Juris Iljins, Director of the Quality Management and Document Processing Department of RTU.
University cooperation with the industry in the ranking is evaluated by how much income the university has gained from knowledge transfer. The science criterion takes into account the results of a reputation survey, university income from research and its productivity. The internationalization criterion assesses the proportion of foreign students and academic staff as well as international cooperation in research based on the citation indicators of scientific publications. Performance in studies is evaluated by the results of a reputation survey, the ratio of students and academic staff, the proportion of academic staff with a doctoral degree, and other indicators. In turn, citation or the impact of research reveals the role of universities in the creation and dissemination of new knowledge and ideas.
The data of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2019 were published on 26 September, and RTU ranked in the 801–1000 group. From Latvia, the University of Latvia has been included in the ranking and it is in the same group, but in the overall score RTU has shown better results. Among the other Baltic States, Vilnius University, Kaunas University of Technology, University of Tartu and Tallinn University of Technology have been included in the ranking. The University of Oxford takes the first place in the rating, which is followed by the University of Cambridge (both from the United Kingdom) and Stanford University (the USA).
The Times Higher Education World University Rankings has been created for the 14 year in a row and it includes 1250 higher education institutions all over the world. The rating evaluates a wide range of data – information provided by the university, data collected by the survey and other information, including the Elsevier bibliometric data, as well as the citation indicators of more than 14 million publications in a five-year period. The rating is audited by PwC audit company.
