Makerere University ranked eighth in Africa

By Conan Businge

MAKERERE once again scooped a top slot in university rankings on the African Continent, according to results released by the University Ranking by Academic Performance (URAP) research laboratory.

The university came 8th out of 59 Higher Education Institutions ranked in 18 African countries.

 The latest ranking shows that the university’s ranking on the continent has continued to improve over time.

University Ranking by Academic Performance was established at the Informatics Institute of the Middle East Technical University in 2009, to develop a ranking system of world universities by academic performance, which is more comprehensive in coverage.

By covering 2,500 HEIs in the world, the URAP ranking avails more universities the opportunity to observe the state of the academic progress at both global and national levels.

It considers the six academic performance indicators including the Number of articles (Current Scientific Productivity), Citation (Research Impact), Cumulative Journal Impact (Scientific Impact), and H-Index (Research Quality).

Others are International Collaboration (International Acceptance), and Google Scholar Results (Long - Term Overall Productivity). A total score of 600 is distributed to each indicator as follows; Number of Articles 24%, Google Scholar Counts 10%, Citation 21%, Cumulative Journal Impact 18%, H-Index 12%, and Collaboration 15%.

The University of Cape Town ranked top in Africa at the 256th position and Harvard University ranked number one in the world.

The data used in the ranking is gathered from Web of Science - an online tool for retrieving accurate citation counts, Google Scholar, open-access sources and credible sources which provide lists of HEIs, such as the ISI (Information Sciences Institute).

Information Sciences Institute is a world leader in research and development of advanced information processing, computer and communications technologies.

The ranking comes almost six months after the transition of Makerere University from a faculty-based to a collegiate university on July 1, 2011, which witnessed the review of the research function.

 Reacting to the rankings, according to the university’s statement, the Director of Quality Assurance Dr. Vincent Ssembatya said, “The academic synergies provided by the college environments have fostered the sourcing of funds for research.

Most of the funding has been directed at research projects. This has in turn improved the quality and volume of publications from research findings,” he added.   

 More so, Makerere was last year ranked by Webometrics, for the second time maintaining the 10th position globally in institutions of higher learning in Africa.     

In February the same year, Makerere rose from the 15th to the 10th position in Africa. Webometrics is an organisation that monitors university performance worldwide.Of the over 26 universities in Uganda, Makerere still is the only one that made it to the top 100 in Africa