UP among Asia's top 200 universities

The University of the Philippines (UP) placed 156th in the top 200 universities in Asia list of the 2018 Times Higher Education (THE) Asia University Rankings released Wednesday.

According to the London-based publication, UP leapfrogged into the THE's list from being mentioned as part of the the 201st to 250th ranked university group in 2017.

The state university also moved up in the THE World University Rankings, which lists the top 1000 universities in the world.

In a statement, the lone university from the Philippines on the 2018 list said it ranked from the 801st-1,000th ranked universities up to the 601st-800th ranked universities.

In the areas of clinical, pre-clinical and health, UP ranks higher, falling under the 201-250 ranked group.

According to data on the THE website, there was an uptick in the university's scores for teaching, research and citations compared to 2017.

UP's citations score or global scholarly mentions in 2018 went up to 40.0 from 13.5 in 2017.

The citations score is a measure of the research influence of the university. THE tries to capture the average number of times a university’s published work is cited by scholars globally, using bibliometric data from Elsevier over five years.

It meanwhile earned a score of 10.0 for "research," which measures the strength of the university's published work, compared to the 9.3 last year.

Its teaching score, on the other hand, slightly rose from 20.1 in 2017 to 20.5 in 2018.

On the UP website, UP Vice President for Academic Affairs Cynthia Rose Bautista said UP is considered one of the top three Asian universities that "moved the most in terms of citations of UP’s published research works by scholars from different parts of the world."

Overall, topping the THE's worldwide list for the third year in a row is the National University of Singapore, followed by China's Tshinghua University and Peking University. —BAP/KG, GMA News