UiB in the world’s top ten

“Although scholars of humanities like ourselves tend to take these kind of rankings with a pinch of salt, I must admit it is encouraging news”, says Jørgen Sejersted, dean at Faculty of Humanities, UiB.

Miles ahead

The prestigious ranking from Times Higher Education (THE) confirms that UiB is one of the world’s most cited universities within humanities, and miles ahead all other Norwegian universities. University of Tromsø is listed as number 156, and University of Oslo as number 173. THE’s yearly ranking is based on a shortlist of the 400 best universities in the world.

According to Sejersted, citation is not known as the most systemised criteria to ensure research quality within humanities, but he thinks this will become more important in the future.

“Whether we like it or not, it seems to be an increasing need to assess quality in research through more identifiable indicators”, says Sejersted.

Strong in philosophy, religious studies and archeology

Sejersted is emphasizing that he has not studied the survey thorough enough to point out exactly why his faculty is scoring this high on citation, but he has an idea of what it may be related to.

“When we worked on the report “Humanities in Norway”, we noticed that philosophy and religious studies came out as very strong academic environments. However, I would not be surprised if some of our outstanding archaeologists plays a great part in why we have made top ten in citation.  In archaeology, we have a Centre of Excellence and an unusually high number of published research papers”, Sejersted explains.

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He is confident that this inspiring score from THE’s report will have a general positive effect on the faculty:

“All good scores are encouraging for us, and especially now as we look to facilitate and further strengthen our research environments in the wake of the Evaluation of Humanities in Norway”.

Number one in the country

Times Higher Education is basing their yearly ranking on a variety of indicators. In September this ranking proved UiB to be the most quoted university overall in Norway, all disciplines included.

“In general the criteria we use to validate citation, is the closest we get to verify the quality in research. Even though we should always take some precautions when studying these rankings, it is still inspiring that this particular assessment establishes that research from UiB is, without a doubt, the most quoted university compared to other Norwegian institutions”, says rector Dag Rune Olsen.

“One could say that even though we don’t publish the most, we publish to a higher standard. Together with a solid score on internationalizing, this underlines UiB’s position as a strong international research university.