London-based magazine Times Higher Education (THE) has placed the University of the Philippines in the world’s top 500 universities and fourth in the ASEAN region, according to the 2020 THE World University Rankings.The national university is listed in the 401-500 group of 1,396 ranked research universities.

This is UP’s fourth year in the rankings. It was included for the first time in 2017 among the top 1,000. The succeeding rankings showed marked improvement for UP as it climbed to the top 800 in the 2018 edition and to the top 600 for 2019.

THE assesses research-intensive universities based on 13 performance indicators in five pillars: teaching (30 percent), research (30 percent), research influence/citations (30 percent), international outlook (7.5 percent) and industry income (2.5 percent).

For 2020, UP has been ranked 159th in citations which places it in the top 11 percent of prestigious universities that have “influence in spreading new knowledge and ideas.” Its score in citations went up from last year’s 69.1 to 86.9. As indicator of research influence, 'citations' refers to the average number of times a university’s published work is cited by scholars globally. This year, THE's bibliometric data supplier Elsevier examined 77.4 million citations to 12.8 million journal articles, article reviews, conference proceedings, books and book chapters published over five years. The data include more than 23,400 academic journals indexed by Elsevier’s Scopus database and all indexed publications between 2014 and 2018. Citations to these publications made in the six years from 2014 to 2019 are also collected.

UP also scored better in teaching (from 21.7 to 24.1), research (from 16.4 to 17.2) and industry income (from 35.8 to 39.4). A global academic reputation survey partly determines the scores for teaching and research.UP, however, slipped in international outlook, with its score down from 39.5 to 37.9. International outlook considers the number of international students and staff as well as international collaboration.Only two universities from the Philippines appeared in the latest table. UP is still the leading university in the country.

THE publishes some of the most influential rankings used by the global academic community which include the Asia University Rankings, Asia-Pacific University Rankings, Emerging Economies University Rankings,  World University Rankings by Subject and Impact Rankings.