Times to perfection: a new rankings leap for UTS

UTS campus, located in the heart of Sydney CBD. Picture: Andy Roberts
UTS campus, located in the heart of Sydney CBD. Picture: Andy Roberts

This article was originally posted on the University of Technology Sydney's website.

The University of Technology Sydney continues an uninterrupted run of improvement in world rankings, jumping 34 places from 194th in the world to equal 160th in the latest Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings.

The result, placing UTS 9th in Australia, is the latest checkpoint in a seven-year journey in which UTS has advanced around 200 places in the THE world rankings.

Acting Vice-Chancellor Professor Andrew Parfitt said UTS’s continued rise up all of the major international rankings was a measure of the growing reputation of the university globally.

“UTS is now regarded not just as a leading technology university, but also as a significant research institution in our own right,” Professor Parfitt said.

“While growing our research quality and output has been part of a deliberate strategy, it has only happened due to the sustained hard work of our staff over a number of years, including through their international collaborations, and it’s they who should be congratulated on this outstanding result."

“This is also great news for our graduates. UTS’s growing reputation continues to enhance the recognition of their qualifications both within Australia and overseas.”

UTS’s improvement in research citations and impact was also noted earlier in the year in the 2020 CWTS Leiden ranking of world universities, where UTS was placed number one in Australia and 54th in the world for the proportion of its research appearing in the top 10 per cent of most-cited publications in scientific fields.

In the THE assessment, UTS also saw an improvement in publications per staff member, which is now at an almost perfect score of 99.9.

The THE research assessment was based on more than 86 million citations to 13.6 million journal articles, article reviews, conference proceedings, books and book chapters published over five years.

It was intended to help show how much each university was contributing to the sum of human knowledge – whose research had stood out, had been picked up and built on by other scholars and shared to expand the boundaries of understanding.

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings include around 1,400 universities across 92 countries, measuring an institution’s performance across teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.

“UTS continues to have an excellent international standing and the university improved its score on each element of international outlook as well.  On that measure we now rank 19th in the world, up from 25th,” Professor Parfitt said.