QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) is an internationally-renowned provider of analytics to the global higher education sector, and its QS World University Rankings portfolio, inaugurated in 2004, is one of the world’s most influential rankings of comparative data on university performance.

 

The rankings announced this week - The QS World University Rankings by Subject 2021 - sees rankings for 51 disciplines, grouped into five broad subject areas.

 

It is a comparative analysis on the performance of 14,435 individual university programs, taken by students at 1,452 universities which can be found in 86 locations across the world.

 

In 2020 UCC ranked across all five broad subject areas, as well as in 19 subjects, in which we were top 100 in one subject and top 200 in five subjects.   

 

This year UCC is again ranked on all five broad subject areas, as well as in 20 subjects.  Of these 20, three ranked in the top 100 with a further three subjects appearing in the top 200, making 6 in total in the top 200.

 

UCC's top performing subjects are  Nursing  (49),  Agriculture & Forestry  (57), and  Law  (100), which make the top 50 and top 100 of their respective global ranks.

 

English Language & Literature  (101-150),  Pharmacy & Pharmacology  (101-150), and  Medicine  (151-200) make up the UCC subjects featuring in the top 200. 

 

UCC disciplines that improved in this year's ranking include  Nursing,  Law,  Medicine and  Modern Languages while newly ranked UCC disciplines this year include the aforementioned  Agriculture & Forestry and  Accounting & Finance.

 

Four indicators are used to rank the subjects : Academic Reputation Survey, Employer Reputation Survey, Citations per paper, and the H-index, an index that attempts to measure both the productivity and impact of the work published by the institutions' scientists and scholars. The index is based on the set of the institution's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications.

 

In Academic Reputation, UCC’s best performance is in  Nursing , in which it scores 71.8. In Employer Reputation, our best performance came in  Biological Sciences  where it earned a score of 74.3.

Agriculture & Forestry is the subject in which UCC earned the highest score (96.1) for Citations Per Paper, while Pharmacy & Pharmacology (87.3) was our best performing subject on the H-Index.