The URAP ranking system's focus is on academic quality. URAP has gathered data about 2,500 Higher Education Institutes (HEI) in an effort to rank these organizations by their academic performance. The overall score of each HEI is based upon its performance over several indicators which are described in the Ranking Indicators section. The ranking includes HEIs except for governmental academic institutions, e.g. the Chinese Academy of Science and the Russian Academy of Science, etc. Data for 2,500 HEIs have been processed and top 2,000 of them are scored. Thus, *URAP covers approximately 10% of all HEIs in the world*, which makes it one of the most comprehensive university ranking systems in the world.

URAP ranking system is completely based on objective data obtained from reliable open sources. The system ranks the universities according to multiple criteria. Most of the currently available ranking systems are both size and subject dependent. The URAP research team is currently working on a new methodology which will minimize the impact of size and subject dependency.

The goal of the URAP ranking system is not to label world universities as best or worst. Our intention is to help universities identify potential areas of progress with respect to specific academic performance indicators. Similar to other ranking systems, the URAP system is neither exhaustive nor definitive, and is open to new ideas and improvements. The current ranking system will be continuously upgraded based on our ongoing research and the constructive feedback of our colleagues.

Methodology