Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) has been adjudged the best university in Ghana and West Africa.
The Ashanti Region-based university also came 14th on the African continent and 706th out of selected 1,500 best universities worldwide.
It displaced two of West Africa’s prestigious tertiary institutions, the University of Ibadan (UI) in Nigeria and fellow compatriots, the University of Ghana (UG), which ranked 17 and 24 in the sub-region, the report indicated.
This is according to Washington-based US News & World Report 2019. The 86-year-old organisation is known for ranking and evaluating universities based on their research performance and its ratings by members of the academic community around the world and in its region.
The U.S. News & World Report is a multi-platform publisher of news and information, which includes; annual print and e-book versions of its authoritative rankings of Best Colleges, Best Graduate Schools and Best Hospitals in the World.
The rankings according to the U.S. News and World Report are produced to provide insight into how universities compare globally so that prospective students could make the best choices.
It, therefore, focuses specifically on the institution’s academic research and overall reputation. The overall best global universities rankings encompass the top 1,500 institutions spread across 81 countries globally.
The first step in producing these rankings, which are powered by Clarivate Analytics Incites, involved creating a pool of 1,599 Universities that is used to rank the top 1,500 schools.
The second step is to calculate the rankings using the 13 indicators and weights that U.S. News chose to measure global research performance.
Each of the 1,500 top-ranked university’s profile pages on usnews.com lists the overall global score as well as numerical ranks for the 13 indicators, allowing students, academics and university leaders to compare each university’s standing in each indicator.
These indicators include; global research reputation, regional research reputation, publications, books authored, conference papers, normalised citation impact, total citations, number of publications that are among the 10% most cited, percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited, international collaboration – relative to country, international collaboration, number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited in their respective field, percentage of total publications that are among the top 1% most highly cited papers, and general reputation.
With a global score of 42.4, KNUST had a global reputation for research of 1,044, regional research reputation of 21. It also obtained 1,572 publications, 1,189 books, 1,444 conferences, 33 normalisation citation impact and a total citation of 1,0409.
In addition, KNUST attained 949 percentage of total publications that are among the 10 per cent most cited, 381 International collaborations – relative to country, and 15 International collaborations. This latest ranking projects KNUST as the best University for teaching, learning and research in Ghana and West Africa as whole.