UP's Pride and Glory
UP retains rank in top 500
Jo. Lontoc, UP Media and Public Relations Office
The University of the Philippines (UP) retains its spot in a roster of the top 500 universities of the world. According to the 2021 Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE-WUR), UP remains in the 401-500 bracket, after being assessed alongside 1,527 research-intensive universities.
The country’s national university maintained its overall rank despite the number of universities ranked this year increasing from last year’s 1,396. Overall, UP is ranked fifth among noted universities in Southeast Asia (SEA): National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), University of Malaya, and the University of Brunei Darussalam.
UP garnered its highest score in the criterion of citations or global research influence, which accounts for 30% of its total score. THE-WUR comes out with the citation score by capturing the average number of times a university’s published work is cited by scholars globally. This year, bibliometric data supplier Elsevier examined 86 million citations from 2015-2020 across 13.6 million journal articles, article reviews, conference proceedings, books and book chapters published from 2015-2019. [View the Times Higher Education World University Rankings report for the University of the Philippines here.]
Breakdown of ranking for the University of the Philippines. Source: Times Higher Education
According to the THE, citations are a way of measuring a university’s role in spreading new knowledge and ideas and its contribution to the sum of human knowledge.
The other performance indicators are grouped into the areas of teaching (30%), research (30%), international outlook (7.5%), and industry income (2.5%).
UP Assistant Vice President for Academic Affairs Carla Dimalanta notes that UP outranks universities in neighboring countries in terms of research citation. Its score of 86.7 outperforms the 81.5 of NUS and the 83 of NTU, the top two ranking universities in the ASEAN region. Singapore’s NUS and NTU are ranked 25 and 47, respectively, in the World University Rankings.
“Our citation score is still a high 86.7, albeit down by a not so significant 0.2 points,” UP Vice President for Academic Affairs Ma. Cynthia Rose Bautista tells UP News. “It has been our strongest criterion, propelling UP to be among the top 500 universities in the world in the last 5 years. Interestingly, UP was among the top 10 universities in the world in terms of its citation score in the clinical, pre-clinical and health disciplines in 2020. Its score was higher than that of the top 10 universities in this field—the University of Oxford, Harvard University, University of Cambridge, Imperial College of London, Stanford University, University of Toronto, John Hopkins University, UCL UK, Yale University and Columbia University,” Bautista explained. THE’s 2021 world university ranking by subject has not yet been released.
UP is the first Philippine university to figure in the THE-WUR and the only one to break into its top 500. The national university first figured in the THE-WUR in its 2017 rankings where it placed in the 801+ bracket. It climbed to the top 601-800 in the 2018 rankings and to the top 501-600 in the 2019 rankings. UP then broke through to the top 500, within the 401-500 bracket, in the 2020 rankings.
UP’s jump into the top 500 has been powered mostly by its outstanding score in research citations or “influence in spreading new knowledge and ideas”. Its score leaped from 69.1 out of 100 in the 2019 rankings to 86.9 in the 2020 rankings.
De La Salle University is the only other Philippine university figuring in the THE-WUR, breaking into the top 801-1,000 in the 2019 rankings, before slipping to 1,001+ in the 2020 and 2021 rankings.
According to the THE-WUR website, “The University of Oxford tops the rankings for the fifth consecutive year, while mainland China’s Tsinghua University becomes the first Asian university to break into the top 20 under the current methodology.”
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, and the World University Rankings by Subject.
Aside from the Elsevier data, responses from 22,000 scholars around the world are also used by THE, specifically in determining the academic reputation of universities. ###
Professor Emeritus Eufemio T. Rasco Jr.
Speakers, 9th International Conference on Agribiz Econ & Mgt
The keynote and plenary speakers in the 9th International Conference on Agribusiness Economics and Management, 13-15 November 2019
Professor Rodolfo M. Nayga Jr.
Prof. Nayga is the Distinguished Professor and Tyson Endowed Chair in Food Policy Economics and Agribusiness at the University of Arkansas, United States. He received his PhD in agricultural economics from Texas A&M University, MS from University of Delaware, and BS in agribusiness economics from the University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB). His research interests include the economics of food consumption, policy, and health. Prior to joining the University of Arkansas, he was a professor at Texas A&M University for twelve years and was a faculty member at Rutgers University, United States, and at Massey University, New Zealand. He has published more than 250 refereed articles in several economics, behavioral science, marketing, and public health journals. Prof. Nayga worked with other universities such as Korea University, Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research, Zhejiang University, Waseda Institute of Advance Studies, Wageningen University, and the Institute of Global Food Security, Queen’s University Belfast
Mr. Grahame Dixie
Mr. Dixie is the executive director of Grow Asia, a multi-stakeholder partnership platform that catalyzes action on inclusive agricultural development in Southeast Asia. The platform convenes governments, farmers, nongovernment organizations, and other stakeholders to co-create value chain initiatives focused on smallholder farmers and environmental sustainability of agriculture. Mr. Dixie brings over thirty-five years of professional experience as a practitioner of agricultural development in over seventy-five countries, including an early career in the private sector. For the past decade, he served as the World Bank’s lead agribusiness advisor where he was involved in the design and review of the World Bank’s portfolio of projects linking smaller scale farmers to markets and agribusinesses. These programs leveraging public and private investment involved innovative financing and research on key issues. His work included advising World Bank teams globally on project design, emerging good practices, and key trends in the food and farm sector, with a focus on market-oriented farming and multi-stakeholder partnerships. More recently, he has served as an advisor to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.
Dr. Kenneth Menz
Dr. Menz began his career as an agricultural scientist before spending the bulk of his working life as an agricultural economist. He specialized on the interface between agricultural science and economics from a range of perspectives (e.g., farming systems research, evaluation of agricultural research, factors affecting agricultural productivity, social science). He spent twenty years as research program manager for the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), where such a multi-disciplinary orientation proved valuable. He has worked for universities (Queensland, Minnesota, RMIT), government agencies (Australian Bureau of Agricultural Economics), international agencies (IITA, Nigeria), and he spent six years undertaking graduate work in the United States. Since “retiring” from ACIAR ten years ago, he continued engagement in head office consultancies as well as via active research roles in ACIAR research projects in Vietnam and the Philippines. Dr. Menz’ notable publications are in weed control economics and impact assessment.
Dr. Rica Joy Flor
Dr. Flor is a postdoctoral fellow of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and Wageningen University, the Netherlands (Wageningen University Postdoc Talent Program). She received her bachelor of arts in anthropology (cum laude) and master of arts in anthropology from the University of the Philippines Diliman. She got her PhD in social science (innovation studies) from Wageningen University where she was on a Global Rice Science Scholarship from IRRI. Dr. Flor has relevant experiences in applied social science research on technology adoption and innovation, impact assessment of technology change in agricultural innovation systems, and facilitating multi-stakeholder processes in agricultural research for development (AR4D) in Southeast Asian countries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. See the video here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DRZY7uonW8rx3zDFszMKoTfyBdr765al/view?ts=5e181bc9
UP breaks into top 500 in world rankings, 2019
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.