Egypt tops Arab universities in SCImago Rankings with 49 universities

26 / 04 / 2023

• news
• The New Republic

Egypt came at the lead of Arab universities placed in the SCImago Institutions Rankings (SIR) which grouped 4533 institutions.

A total of 302 Arab universities were placed in the SCImago Rankings, including universities of Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Oman, Jordan, Tunisia, Iraq, Morocco, Algeria

A total of 49 Egyptian universities were placed in the SIR, thus marking the highest number of universities of an Arab country in the rankings.

The Egyptian universities in the SCImago Rankings included Cairo University, Ain Shams University, Alexandria University, Mansoura University, Zagazig University, Al-Azhar University, Kafrelsheikh University, Assiut University, Suez Canal University, Tanta University, Benha University, Beni Suef University, Menoufia University, Misr University for Science and Technology, Minia University, Damanhour University, Egyptian Russian University, Misr International University, Pharos University in Alexandria, and Helwan University.

The Egyptian universities also comprised Heliopolis University, Fayoum University, University of Sadat City, Suez University, October University for Modern Sciences and Arts, Future University in Egypt, the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport, the Nile University, Zewail City of Science and Technology, the British University in Egypt, Aswan University, South Valley University, the American University in Cairo, Sohag University, Horus University, Al-Ahram Canadian University, and Damietta University

The Egyptian universities also included Delta University for Science and Technology, Port Said University, Military Technical College, Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology, Modern University for Technology and Information, the German University in Cairo, Nahda University, Deraya University, the October 6 University, Higher Technological Institute, Badr University in Cairo,  and Sinai University

Iraq came in the second position of the Arab universities in SIR with 41 universities, followed by Algeria with 39 universities, Saudi Arabia 36 universities, Morocco 26 universities, Jordan 21 universities, Tunisia 18 universities and the UAE 17 universities.

SIR Methodology:

SIR is a classification of academic and research-related institutions ranked by a composite indicator that combines three different sets of indicators based on research performance, innovation outputs and societal impact measured by their web visibility.

It provides a friendly interface that allows the visualization of any customized ranking from the combination of these three sets of indicators. Additionally, it is possible to compare the trends for individual indicators of up to six institutions. For each large sector it is also possible to obtain distribution charts of the different indicators.

In order to achieve the highest level of precision for the different indicators, an extensive manual process of disambiguation of the institution’s names has been carried out. The development of an assessment tool for bibliometric analysis aimed to characterize research institutions involves  an  enormous  data  processing  task  related  to  the  identification  and  disambiguation  of institutions  through  the  institutional  affiliation  of  documents  included  in  Scopus.

The objective of SCImago, in this respect, is twofold. The first object is the definition  and  unique  identification  of  institutions; the  drawing  up  of  a  list  of  research institutions where every institution is correctly identified and defined. Typical issues on this task include institution’s merge or segregation and denomination changes.

The second object is attribution of publications and citations to each institution. The SIR has taken into account the institutional  affiliation  of  each  author  in  the  field  ‘affiliation’  of  the database.  The SIR has developed a mixed system (manual and automatic) for the assignment of affiliations to one or more institutions, as applicable, in addition to an identification of multiple documents with the same DOI and/or title.

Thoroughness in the identification of institutional affiliations is one of the key values of the guaranteed standardization process, in any case, the highest possible levels of disambiguation.

For the ranking purposes, the calculation is generated each year from the results obtained over a period of five year ending two years before the edition of the ranking. For instance, if the selected year of publication is 2021, the results used are those from the five year period 2015-2019. The only exception is the case of web indicators which have only been calculated for the last year.

Indicators are divided into three groups intended to reflect scientific, economic and social characteristics of institutions.