RSU Continues to Rise in U-Multirank World University Rankings

RSU received an A grade in the indicator analysing investment in digital education that was included in this year’s U-Multirank ratings for the first time.

U-Multirank is an international ranking of higher education institutions. This year, it includes 2,200 universities from 96 countries, including 21 Latvian universities. Universities’ performance is compared in five areas: teaching and learning, research, knowledge transfer, international orientation, and regional engagement. U-Multirank ranks universities on more than 30 indicators, giving individual grades from A (very good) to E (weak).

This year, RSU received A grades in each of the five defined performance areas and also managed to increase the number of B (good) grades from five last year to nine this year.

Each of these grades represents excellence in a specific area, excellence that has been built up through dedicated work. It is very gratifying that this achievement has been recognised on an international level in the evaluation of the world’s best universities. We are particularly pleased that the digitisation aspect has been noticed and appreciated, as RSU has invested in the digital environment for a long time, which has allowed us to modernise both our studies and research. When the pandemic started, we were pioneers in remote studies and digitising study materials. RSU has also developed both an open access policy and an institutional open access e-resource repository policy that open our scientific results to researchers and the general public.

RSU Rector, Prof. Aigars Pētersons

In this year’s U-Multirank rankings, RSU received the highest number of A grades – five – in research: open access and professional publications, the number of post-doc positions at the university, creative outputs in research, and in one of the gender equality indicators included in the ranking – scientific publications authored by women. The second-best area, in which RSU received three A grades, is regional engagement. Here, as last year, RSU scored highest in bachelor’s and master’s graduate regional employment rates and the share of publications with co-authors from the region. The third strongest area for RSU in the U-Multirank assessment is international orientation where we received an A grade for both the proportion of international academic staff and the share of publications with international co-authors. RSU received one A grade in each of the two other performance areas: teaching and learning and knowledge transfer.

U-Multirank 2022 results

About U-Multirank

U-Multirank takes a different approach to other known global university rankings, as it does not produce traditional ranking tables of universities that name the best universities. The data included in the rankings is drawn from a number of sources, such as institutional data, the international Web of Science database, and patent databases providing users with a comprehensive set of information. U-Multirank is funded by a consortium including the European Commission, the Bertelsmann Stiftung foundation and Banco Santander, who also work closely with a range of partners and organisations.