Safa Jafari Safa, Office of Communications, communications@aub.edu.lb
The American University of Beirut (AUB) moved from ranking 472nd to a tie at 381st globally in the US News' 10th edition of the
Best Global Universities rankings. AUB is also tied at 89th in Asia, ranking eighth in the Arab region and 1st in Lebanon.
A significant achievement is also AUB's increased average Normalized Citation Impact (NCI) rank, which surged from ranking 304th to 25th worldwide. The NCI, also known as the Field Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI), is a bibliometric that normalizes the citation count of a publication based on the average number of citations received by articles of the same type, year, and subject. It is considered one of the core measures of research performance and is used by various research evaluation bodies globally.
AUB has also seen consistent improvement in the Global Research Reputation indicator, reaching a rank of 355 globally. This reflects the aggregation of the most recent five years of results (2019–2023) from Clarivate's Academic Reputation Survey for the best universities globally for research. The surveys had a total of 28,666 respondents, providing a comprehensive snapshot of academics' opinions about world universities. Respondents were asked to share their views on programs in the disciplines with which they were familiar.
This year's Best Global Universities ranking includes the top 2,250 universities (up from 2,000 universities ranked last year) across 104 countries (up from last year's 95 countries).
AUB's Top Research Rank Performance in Subject Rankings
AUB achieved a remarkable first place worldwide in the Normalized Citation Impact (NCI) for Clinical Medicine and a subject ranking of 144 globally. Similarly, AUB's NCI rank for Public, Environmental, and Occupational Health is 48, while its global subject ranking is 106. These subject-specific rankings identify the leaders in key academic areas based on academic research performance in those fields. They do not reflect the rankings of academic majors, departments, or specific schools at universities, such as business or medical schools.
According to Clarivate, the
clinical medicine category covers journals that deal with research and advances being made in the field of medicine, focusing on a variety of medical and biomedical topics that range from anesthesia, surgery and cardiovascular medicine to nursing, obstetrics, and reproductive medicine.
The
public, environmental, and occupational health category covers resources on epidemiology, hygiene and health; parasitic diseases and parasitology; tropical medicine; industrial medicine; occupational medicine; infection control; and preventive medicine. Also included are journals on environmental health, cancer causes and control, aviation, aerosol, and wilderness medicine.
Thirteen separate ranking factors were used to enable cross-border comparisons of higher education institutions, focusing on institutions' research and reputation performance. The indicators include global and regional research reputation, publications, books, conferences, normalized citation impact, total citations, the number and percentage of publications among the top 10 percent most cited, the number and percentage of highly cited papers among the top 1 percent most cited, and international collaboration.
The US News 2024–25 academic research and reputation rankings reflect AUB's prestigious position globally as a research institution with renowned faculty members and key academic output. Its strong performance aligns with several successes in other global rankings: