Academic Centre
University of Latvia retains its high 251–300 place in “THE Emerging Economies University Rankings 2020”, produced by one of the world’s most prestigious higher education institution ranking agency “Times Higher Education” (THE).
The rankings use the same 13 performance indicators as the THE World University Rankings to judge institutions: Teaching (the learning environment), including reputation survey, staff-to-student ratio, doctorate-to-bachelor’s ratio, doctorates-awarded-to-academic-staff ratio; Institutional income; Research (volume, income and reputation), including reputation survey, research income, research productivity; Citations (research influence); International outlook (staff, students, research), including proportion of international students, proportion of international staff, international collaboration, as well as Industry income (knowledge transfer). These performance indicators are recalibrated to reflect the development priorities of universities in emerging economies.
“This steadfast rating motivates us to rise ever higher. The UL Academic Centre is becoming increasingly attractive both to Latvian and foreign students, and it is reflected in the enrolment results, where the growth of foreign student proportion is observed. There is also an increase in guest lecturers and visiting researchers at the University of Latvia,” said Jānis Stonis, UL Deputy Rector for Student and Social Affairs. “The university also has excellent results in international scientific cooperation. The number of publications with foreign co-authors on the increase and the number of articles published in scientific journals is rising. We are proud of the growing number of international projects at the university – it has stepped up by 45% since 2015,” says J. Stonis.
The result achieved in THE Emerging Economies University Rankings 2020 is significantly influenced by the scientific and research activities of the university. “The UL has released a total of 2 490 scientific publications in 2019, of which 702 publications by the UL researchers have been published in the Scopus and Web of Science databases, and out of these 453 articles have been published in international journals. Most articles belong to the fields of exact sciences, life sciences and medicine. The largest number of publications with foreign co-authors originates at the UL Institute of Chemical Physics – 66, followed by the UL Faculty of Medicine with 49 publications in 2019,” comments Ineta Romanovska, leading expert of the UL Department of Science.
Out of Latvian higher education institutions, THE Rankings include the University of Latvia, Riga Technical University and Latvia University of Life Sciences and Technologies. Several universities of China hold the leading positions: the 1st place is taken by Tsinghua University, the 2nd place – by Peking University, while the 3rd place – by Zhejiang University.
Overall, these THE rankings encompass 533 universities from 47 countries.
THE is among the world's three most influential university rankings, published already for the 17th year. THE releases a total of 11 separate detailed subject rankings. The THE World University Rankings by subject include: engineering; computer science; business and economics; life sciences; clinical and health; psychology; law; education; physical science; social science; and arts and humanities.
More information about THE Rankings is available here.
