UDSM among top institutions in Africa

UNIVERSITY of Dar es Salaam has once again featured among the highest ranked universities on the African Continent, according to results released by the University Ranking by Academic Performance (URAP) research laboratory.

Tanzania also has Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA) and Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences (MUHAS) featured on the list. University of Dar es Salaam comes 36th in Africa and 1,593rd in the world; SUA is at slot 45 in Africa and 1,771st in the world and MUHAS ranks 42nd in Africa and 1716th in the world.

University Ranking by Academic Performance was established at the Informatics Institute of the Middle East Technical University, in 2009, to develop a ranking system of world universities by academic performance, which is more comprehensive in coverage.

By covering 2,500 Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in the world, the URAP ranking avails more universities the opportunity to observe academic progress at both global and national levels.

It considers the six academic performance indicators including the Number of articles (Current Scientific Productivity), Citation (Research Impact), Cumulative Journal Impact (Scientific Impact), and H-Index (Research Quality). Others are International Collaboration (International Acceptance), and Google Scholar Results (Long-Term Overall Productivity).

A total score of 600 is distributed to each indicator as follows: Number of Articles -- 24 per cent; Google Scholar Counts -- 10 per cent; Citation - 21 per cent; Cumulative Journal Impact - 18 per cent; H-Index -- 12 per cent; and Collaboration -- 1 per cent.

The University of Cape Town ranked top in Africa and Harvard University ranked number one in the world.

The data used in the ranking is gathered from Web of Science -- an online tool for retrieving accurate citation counts, Google Scholar, open-access sources and credible sources which provide lists of HEIs, such as the ISI (Information Sciences Institute).

Information Sciences Institute is a world leader in research and development of advanced information processing, computer and communications technologies.

The ranking comes a year after the transition of UDSM from a faculty-based to a collegiate and schools. More so, UDSM has always ranked high by Webometrics, in institutions of higher learning in Africa.  Webometrics is an organisation that monitors university performance worldwide.