The University moved up 24 places to 330th, building on the rapid progress achieved in this schema in recent years, with an overall increase of 157 places since 2016.
Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation and Vice-President, Professor Calum Drummond, said these latest results highlight RMIT’s extensive local, national and international collaboration, strong industry connections and multidisciplinary research.
“As a global University, we are proud of the expansive collaborations and partnerships that we have developed locally and internationally as we pursue research that is focused on making a real difference to our communities,” he said.
“RMIT’s rise in the ARWU also demonstrates our ongoing focus on quality research and performance in top research publications.
“Working closely with industry, our multidisciplinary research is well positioned to find solutions for the plethora of complex economic, social and environmental challenges arising in our ever-changing world.
“We’ve continued to invest in outstanding research facilities and systems to support our researchers and proud of the exceptional talent and expertise in our research community.”
More than 2000 universities are ranked in the ARWU each year out of more than 19,000 institutions globally, with the best 1,000 universities published.
ARWU uses six objective indicators to rank world universities, including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals; highly cited researchers selected by Clarivate Analytics; articles published in Nature and Science; articles indexed in Sciences Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index; and per capita performance.
This latest ranking improvement follows the recent release of the ShanghaiRanking Global Ranking of Academic Subjects (GRAS) where RMIT had seven subjects ranked in the top 100 this year.
RMIT also performed strongly in the 2020 CWTS Leiden Ranking, which ranks the world’s top research-intensive universities. The University moved up 21 places to be ranked 293rd globally on proportion of international publications and was ranked 225th on proportion of top 5% publications, up 120 places from 2019.
Story: Kate Milkins and Angel Calderon
