Times Higher Education rates UNIPORT sixth in Africa in research

The world’s most trusted rankings provider, the Times Higher Education (THE) has ranked the University of Port Harcourt (UNIPORT), the sixth in Africa and best university in Nigeria in research. In the ranking released last week, tagged: “The first glimpse of future Africa University Rankings,” the University of Cape Town takes top spot, with South Africa dominating the top five positions. According to the organizers of the ranking, “the university rankings provider has revealed the top 15 universities in the region, based solely on their scores for research influence – in other words, how many African universities’ research papers are referred to and cited by other academics across the globe.” On the methodology used, it listed among other that the research publication and citation data is derived from Elsevier’s Scopus database: www. elsevier.com/scopus; while an institution must have published a minimum of 500 papers to be considered between the period of 2009 and 2013. For the ranking, the articles, reviews and conference papers were considered; use of fractionalised counting with the threshold set at 50 (fractionalised) papers per annum as considered in the exercise. The Editor of the Times Higher Education, Phil Baty said of the World University Rankings: “This is an experimental and preliminary ranking based solely on research, and only on one aspect of research – how many times research papers are cited by other academics.

“When we develop a full Africa University Ranking, we expect to add many more indicators, by examining things like a university’s economic contribution, its civic engagement and of courses its teaching. In the list of the best 15 universities are University of Cape Town, South Africa; University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa; Makerere University, Uganda; University of Stellenbosch, South Africa; University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa and the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria, which came sixth in that order. UNIPORT has 573.55 research publications between 2009 and 2013, with an overall score of 88.92 per cent. Others are University of the Western Cape, South Africa; University of Nairobi, Kenya; University of Johannesburg, South Africa; Universite Cadi Ayyad, Morocco; University of Pretoria, South Africa; University of Ghana, Ghana; University of South Africa, South Africa; Suez Canal University, Egypt and Université Hassan II, Morocco.

“To be included in this future-gazing table, an institution must have published a minimum of 500 research papers in the five-year period assessed with at least 50 papers per year,” Phil said, stressing that 30 African universities were ranked. Meanwhile, between July 30 and 31, the Times Higher Education will hold the African Universities Summit, billed for the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, where all the 30 universities, according to Phil, would be unveiled. In the release sent to the New Telegraph, he said the Africa universities summit would present the perfect opportunity to help shape this future ranking and to ensure that Times Higher Education develops the most appropriate and relevant ranking for Africa, in full consultation with African universities.