Three degree courses taught by the UPF are in first place for the whole of Spain and, in total, nine are among the five best of their kind, according to the ranking published in the newspaper El Mundo.
Pompeu Fabra University occupies eighth place in the ranking of state-run universities published today in the newspaper El Mundo. The ranking classifies the best Spanish universities -71 state and private universities in the whole of Spain- teaching the 50 first-cycle courses for which there were most applications from students last June and picks out the five best universities where they are taught. Taking into account both state-run and private universities, the UPF is in ninth place.
The UPF is among the five best universities in Spain for nine of the courses taught at it. Three of its courses -Business Sciences, Political and Administration Sciences, and Audiovisual Communication- are in first place; four -Business Management and Administration, Economics, Humanities and Labour Relations- are in second place; and two -Law and Translation and Interpretation- are in fifth place.
These results are especially important bearing in mind that the UPF teaches only fourteen of the fifty courses included in the table, which testifies to the high overall standard of the courses run by the University.
El Mundo highlights the fact that the UPF is one of the quality universities that has opted for "innovation and personalised attention and is characterised by its technological potential". The newspaper also values the wide range of new postgraduate programmes -21 official Master's courses and 10 PhD courses- that facilitate specialisation and high-level research by its students.
The classification obtained by the courses in the ranking for 2008 compared with that for 2007 is as follows:
Selection criteria for the ranking
The eighth edition of the report published by El Mundo contains information on 48 of the 82 Spanish universities. It is based on 25 assessment criteria divided into three major sections. The first is devoted to the results of a questionnaire given to 2,000 lecturers from all over Spain (with a weighting of 40%). The second contains data supplied by the universities themselves -the demand for places, human resources, physical resources, syllabuses, results and information on context- accounting for 50% of the final score. It also includes assessment criteria concerning the universities' adaptation to the European Higher Education Space.
Lastly, the report also takes into account various external indicators, such as the results of international rankings, reports by the Spanish National Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation (ANECA), university self-assessment exercises and the results of reports by Spanish universities, which together account for 10% of the score.
According to the survey “Atlas digital de la España universitaria”, carried out by a team of geographers from the Cantabria University, UPF Library ranks top on the list of Spanish university and scientific libraries. The parameters used in this survey were interpreted and drawn up based on the Anuario de las Bibliotecas Universitarias y Científicas Españolas, published by REBIUN (Network of Spanish University Libraries).
The articles published by Pompeu Fabra University are the most frequently quoted on average (13.5 quotes per article) of the 71 pubic universities in Spain, according to the survey “Informe anual 2006 sobre la visibilidad de la Universidad Rovira i Virgili”, which, carried out by the said university, is based on data from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and highlights the quality of UPF publications.
The same study also pointed out that UPF heads the ranking of Spanish universities as far as the number of publications is concerned (383) per tenured lecturer (289), which gives us a ratio of 1.33 publications per lecturer.
SCImago Research Group published the results of the first ranking on scientific production in Latin American countries. The survey was led by the University of Granada. According to the survey results, UPF is high up on the ranking as regards scientific production in the fields of economics and law, holding the second and sixth position respectively.