According to QSUR 2024, published on Tuesday, Porto has risen 21 places since the last edition of the international higher education ranking, which evaluates 2963 different institutions on nine factors.

MIT this year has claimed first place for the twelfth year in a row, followed by the Two British universities of Cambridge and Oxford. The top 10 is filled by Harvard and Stanford, Imperial College London, ETH Zurich, Singapore National University, UCL (UK), and Berkeley, in California.

In Portugal, after Porto comes the universities of Aveiro (344th), Coimbra (351st), Nova de Lisboa (400th), Minho (611-620th), ISCTE (751-760th), and the Portuguese Catholic University (901-950th).

The best-ranked institution of the Portuguese language is São Paulo University, in Brazil, which is also the highest ranked in Latin America.

The nine factors used to elaborate this ranking are: academic reputation (30%), staff citations (20%), reputation among employers (15%), employability (5%), staff/student ratio (10%), international student population (5%), international staff (5%), collaboration in international investigations (5%), and sustainability (5%).

In a press conference, QS vice-president Ben Sowter highlighted that this year “the biggest methodical change” was made in the list since its inception in 2004.

Among the new criteria, he drew attention to the sustainability metric, which evaluates each university’s contribution to reducing their environmental impact, as well as the “international research network,” which promotes collaborating with institutions from other countries, and reputation among employers.

In return, the weight of the staff/student ratio and of academic reputation indicators were reduced.

With this new methodology, 75% of African universities rose in the ranking, the “Arab region is getting more and more competitive” and Australia has been able to get three universities in the top 20 for the first time.

Ben Sowter also noted that because of the ever-growing relevance of the ranking, over the last few years there’s been ways “some universities have adapted” to better fulfil the criteria considered by QSUR.

“Universities have started to have a more serious consideration for their reputation, they improved communication and concentrated on being stricter as to the research they conduct and its potential impact,” the QS vice president added.

When questioned about the possibility of some institutions trying to improve their position by paying prestigious researchers to register in their university but worth in another, Sowter reassured that “the place for that kind of tactic, were it to exist, would have the biggest effect on the citation factors.”

The vice president explained that the QS classification uses the Scopus scientific citation database, compiled by the Elsevier academic publisher, which “works hard to guarantee the continued precision of their data.”