Science - November 5, 2011

Wageningen best life sciences Dutch university

Wageningen UR scores high under the life sciences category in the Times Higher Education rankings. It stands at the 17th place worldwide, 5th in Europe and has the highest score among Dutch universities.

It was announced a month ago that Wageningen UR is at the 75th place of the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings. This general ranking list has now been categorized according to research areas. The performance of Wageningen UR has been compared to that of other universities in the same subject area in the specific life sciences category under which it is grouped.
The life sciences ranking list is headed by Harvard University, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Cambridge. Behind twelve American and four English universities comes Wageningen at position 17, making it one of the strongest rising stars; it was not even among the top-50 last year. Among the Dutch universities, Utrecht enters at position 30 on the list.
The spectacular rise, as is the case in the general rankings, is the result of a readjusted calculation methodology used by THE. In the new system, the performance in each research area is calculated in more detail and teaching performance is given more weight. At the same time, the publication and citation scores of Wageningen UR have also improved. In the past, only American, English and Canadian universities were among the best 25. Those on this year's list also include Wageningen (17), ETH Zurich (21) and Tokyo (25).