Which are SA’s top varsities?

South Africa’s top universities have been ranked by an international ranking system, Academic Performance (URAP), using six academic performance indicators.

URAP says it uses an academic performance based ranking, where publications form the basis of the ranking methodology.

Both the quality and quantity of publications and international research collaboration performance are used as indicators.

So who is the top ranked university in South Africa according to URAP’s indicators?

The University of Cape Town takes the prize, followed by the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of KwaZulu Natal came in third.

Stellenbosch University and the University of Pretoria close out the top five.

URAP notes that the goal of their ranking system is not to label world universities as best or worst.

It says the ranking is meant to help universities identify potential areas of progress with respect to certain academic performance indicators.

URAP uses data collected from the Web of Science, an online subscription-based scientific citation indexing service, and other sources which comprise of lists of higher education institutions.

Two thousand five hundred higher education institutions with highest number of publications were initially considered, and 2,000 of these were ranked after data processing.

Top 16 South African Universities according to URAP