The University of Ibadan has become the first Nigerian institution to appear in the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) list of the world’s top 1,000 universities.
The 2019 instalment of the ARWU, also known as the Shanghai rankings, was released on 15th August.
The school was ranked in the bottom band, spanning places 901-1000.
African representation in the Shanghai rankings is traditionally smaller than in the other major rankings, and also appear lower down the lists.
In 2018 Uganda’s Makerere University became the first sub-Saharan Africa university outside South Africa to appear in the rankings, alongside universities in Egypt and Tunisia.
However, Makerere fell out of the 2019 ranking.
The universities of Cape Town and the Witwatersrand are in joint top spot in Africa in the 201-300 band. UCT moved up one band to re-join Wits in first place in Africa.
Egypt’s Cairo University moved up one band to pass Stellenbosch University as the third highest in Africa.
Cairo moved up to the 301-400 band while Stellenbosch remained in the 401-500 band, along with the universities of Pretoria and KwaZulu-Natal. UP’s position was unchanged while UKZN moved up one band.
The universities of South Africa and the North-West both improved their positions lower down the table.
Egypt’s four other universities in the rankings remained stable. Tunisia’s University of Sfax dropped out of the rankings in 2019 while the Université de Tunis El Manar held its position in the 801-900 band.
Harvard and Stanford in the United States took the top two positions. Almost all the universities in the top 20 are in the US.
Commenting on the development, UI Vice-Chancellor, Idowu Olayinka on Friday thanked the federal government of Nigeria, staff members and students of the school for making the feat possible.
In his words, “ARWU is unarguably the world’s no 1 university ranking body. It feels good to appear on this list for the first time ever.
Congratulations to all those who have made this possible- The Federal Government of Nigeria (our proprietor), Council, Senate, Management, Staff, Students, Alumni and Friends of UI. With your continued support we are poised to scale greater heights in the coming years.The University of Ibadan seems to be doing something right. I guess congratulations are in order!
“ARWU uses six objective indicators to rank world universities, including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, number of highly cited researchers selected by Clarivate Analytics, number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science, number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index – Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, and per capita performance of a university. More than 1800 universities are actually ranked by ARWU every year and the best 1000 are published”
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