Uppsala University advances in reputation ranking

Last year, Swedish media reported extensively on the fact that Uppsala University and Lund University ended up below the 100 mark in Times Higher Education’s World Reputation Ranking. In the new ranking for 2015, Uppsala University is back on the list, in the 81–90 interval.

This is the fifth year that Times Higher Education publishes a ranking based entirely on the reputation of the world’s universities. The ranking is based on a large number of selected people’s opinions on different universities’ reputation and status – not on data about their organisation, performance or quality. In total, more than 10,000 researchers in 142 countries have listed the universities they consider to be the very best within their own field of research.

Just as before, Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, MIT, Stanford and Berkeley top the list. This year’s ranking has two Swedish universities among the top 100: Karolinska Institutet in 45th place and Uppsala University in the 81–90 interval. Another two Nordic universities can be found in the same interval – Helsinki and Copenhagen.

‘Uppsala University has seen a positive development in most global rankings over the last year and is now among the top 100 on all the important rankings’, says Vice-Chancellor Eva Åkesson.

‘This particular ranking is based on a special method where colleagues rate how they perceive different universities within their own subject. We don’t have enough information about how the selection has been made and what the respondents have had in mind to draw any hard conclusions, but naturally we are very pleased every time Uppsala University does well in these contexts’, comments Eva Åkesson.