The CWUR rankings released this week however placed Nigeria 80th in the list of countries with high quality research output in electrical and electronic engineering, but could not place the country’s institutions amongst the world’s 1,000 best.
It would be recalled that Nigeria’s premier university, the University of Ibadan, was ranked amongst the world’s best 800 in similar rankings conducted by a London-based organization, the Times Higher Education in 2016.
According to Times, the rankings evaluated the institutions on five performance indicators namely: teaching, research, citations, international outlook and industry income.
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University of Ibadan, Nigeria’s only university on the list, scored 22.7 points in teaching, 26.1 in international outlook, 29.2 in industry income, 11.1 in research and 4.6 per cent in citations.
However, while the latest rankings by CWUR had no Nigerian university in its list, five South African universities and four Egyptian institutions were among the 1, 000 best.
The South African University of Witwatersrand was listed 176th, University of Cape Town 265th, Stellenbosch University 329th, University of KwaZulu-Natal 468th, and the University of Pretoria 697th.
Egyptian universities which made the list include: Cairo University which came 771st, Ain Shams University at 960th; Mansoura University, 985th, and Alexandria University which came a distant 995th.
Meanwhile, Harvard maintained the top spot it assumed since 2012, while Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford and Columbia University were ranked, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th respectively.
According to CWUR “The rankings are based on eight broad criteria on which the institutions are rated. These are Quality of Education, measured by the number of a university’s alumni who have won major international awards, prizes, and medals relative to the university’s size (25%).
“Alumni Employment, measured by the number of a university’s alumni who have held CEO positions at the world’s top companies relative to the university’s size (25%), Quality of Faculty, measured by the number of academics who have won major international awards, prizes, and medals (25%) and, Publications, measured by the number of research papers appearing in reputable journals (5%).
Others criteria are “Influence, measured by the number of research papers appearing in highly-influential journals (5%); Citations, measured by the number of highly-cited research papers (5%); Broad Impact, measured by the university’s h-index (5%) and Patents, measured by the number of international patent filings (5%).”