This was captured in the Washington-based US News & World Report 2019, an organisation 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.
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 percent most cited, 381 International collaborations – relative to the 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 a whole.
The Report further ranked the University of Ibadan (UI) in Nigeria and the University of Ghana (UG) 17 and 24 respectively in the sub-region.
About the U.S. News & World Report
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.
Here are the top 20 universities in Africa for 2019, according to the report
- University of Cape Town – South Africa
- University of Witwatersrand – South Africa
- Stellenbosch University – South Africa
- University of KwaZulu Natal – South Africa
- University of Johannesburg – South Africa
- Cairo University – Egypt
- University of Pretoria – South Africa
- University of Casablanca Hassan 2 – Morocco
- Makerere University – Uganda
- Addis Ababa University – Ethiopia
- North West University – South Africa
- Mansoura University – Egypt
- Ain Shams University – Egypt
- Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology – Ghana
- Mohammed V University – Morocco
- University of Western Cape – South Africa
- University of Ibadan – Nigeria
- University of Marrakech Cadi Ayyad – Morocco
- Alexandria University – Egypt
- University of Nairobi – Kenya
