According to results released by the University Ranking by Academic Performance (URAP) Research Laboratory, Turkey, Makerere University is indeed one of the top-ten Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Africa.

URAP, established at the Informatics Institute of the Middle East Technical University in 2009, aims at developing a ranking system of world universities by academic performance that is more comprehensive in coverage. By covering 2,500 HEIs in the world, the URAP ranking avails more universities the opportunity to observe the state of the academic progress at both global and national levels.

Unlike the popular Webometrics rank which is based on the criteria of Visibility/Inlinks, Size and Rich files, URAP considers the six academic performance indicators of; Number of articles (Current Scientific Productivity), Citation(Research Impact), Cumulative Journal Impact (Scientific Impact), H-Index (Research Quality), International Collaboration(International Acceptance), and Google Scholar Results (Long – Term Overall Productivity), an indicator also considered by the Webometrics rank.

The URAP research laboratory ranked Makerere University as 736^th in the world, with the University of Cape Town ranked top in Africa at the 253^rd position and Harvard University ranked number one in the world. Please refer to Table1 for the top five Universities worldwide and Table2 for the top 10 African Universities. Most notable (ref Table1) is that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-MIT which regularly tops the Webometric rankings comes in at number thirteen by the URAP ranking.

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) – a world leader in research and development of advanced information processing, computer and communications technologies. According to information available on the website for the rankings, 2500 HEIs with highest number of publications were initially considered, and 2000 of them were ranked after data processing. A total score of 600 is distributed to each indicator as follows; Number of Articles 24%, Google Scholar Counts 10%, Citation 21%, Cumulative Journal Impact 18%, H-Index 12%, and Collaboration 15%. The institution with the highest score, in this case Harvard-583.44 takes the first position.

With the vision to be the leading institution for academic excellence and innovations in Africa, Makerere has embraced academic reforms so as to enable her to become a research-led university, through ensuring that crosscutting issues such as internationalization are fully implemented. This will be manifested in the form of integration of the international perspective in teaching, learning and collaborative research, as well as joint degree awards.

The result of this will not only be an increased volume but also an improved quality of research. Therefore, as international competition and collaboration have become high priority, items on the agenda of most universities around the world, the URAP rank accords Makerere University an additional tool to regularly evaluate her academic performance and progress as spelt out in the ten-year strategic plan, so as to help strengthen and sustain this advancement.

Table1 – Top World

Table2 – Top Africa

Resources

http://urapcenter.org/2010/index.php

http://www.webometrics.info/

Compiled by  Dr. Vincent A. Ssembatya – Director, Quality Assurance