THE UNIVERSITY of the Philippines has outranked universities in Southeast Asia in terms of global research influence, according to the 2021 Times Higher Education World University Rankings.

UP ranked first when it comes to research citation among higher education institutions.

“Citation has been our strongest criterion, propelling UP to be among the top 500 universities in the world in the last five years,” UP Vice President for Academic Affairs Ma. Cynthia Rose Bautista said.

“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,” Bautista added.

The university obtained a score of 86.7 in the citations criterion, surpassing the  scores of the top four universities in the region — the National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, University of Malaya, and the University of Brunei Darussalam.

NUS and NTU got 81.5 and 83.0 for citation, respectively.

Universities were also assessed based on their performance in the areas of teaching, research, international outlook, and industry income.

According to THE-WUR, UP maintained its position among the world’s top 500 HEIs after being evaluated with an overall score of 39.8–43.5 alongside 1,527 universities.

The university received 23.5 for teaching, 16.0 for research, 86.7 for citation, 39.5 for industry income, and 33.4 for international outlook.

De La Salle University was the only other university in the country included in THE-WUR as part of the world’s best 1,001+ universities in 2021.