The University of Port Harcourt (UNIPORT), Rivers State, has emerged as the only Nigerian university on the list of the 30 best universities in Africa for 2015, in a rating released by the World Economic Forum (WEF).
UNIPORT came sixth on the list, behind four South African and one Ugandan university. While South Africa dominated the list with 12 positions on the ranking, Egypt placed second with six of its universities on the list while Morocco and Tunisia had three universities each on the list. Only one university from Kenya, Ghana, Cameroon, Uganda, Ethiopia and Nigeria, respectively, made the 2015 ranking.
“These results are essentially based on the amount of citations there are for the university’s work,” the WEF said.
Quoting Times Higher Education (THE), WEF said the universities are “derived from the methodology for the current world university ranking, using the 13 factors (below), combining THE’s own enormous database of statistics along with the Elsevier’s Scopus database – a system that highlights some of the continent’s top performers in terms of how often research papers are referred to and cited by other academics globally.”
“This methodology is designed for the research-led globally facing university. Times Higher Education emphasised that not everyone in Africa will find the metrics appropriate to their mission or their strategic priorities making this ranking a starting point of a longer, inclusive conversation involving African institutions,” it added.