URAP's ranking of Top 2000 world universities is based on 6 academic performance indicators. Since URAP is an academic performance based ranking, publications constitute the basis of the ranking methodology. Both quality and quantity of publications and international research collaboration performance are used as indicators. The indicators, the data sources, and the duration of coverage are summarized in the table below.

Number of Articles: is the measure of current scientific productivity which includes articles published in 2010 and indexed by Web of Science. The weight of this indicator on the overall ranking is %21.

Citation: is the measure of research impact and scored according to the total number of citations received in 2010 for the articles published in 2006-2010 and indexed by ISI. Self-citations are excluded. The effect of citation on the overall ranking is %21.

Total Document: is the measure of sustainability and continuity of scientific productivity and presented by total document count which covers all scholarly literature including conference papers, reviews, letters, discussions, scripts in addition to journal articles published in 2010. Data is obtained from Web of Science and the contribution of this indicator to the overall ranking is %10.

Journal Impact Total: is a measure of scientific impact which is derived by aggregating the impact factors of journals in which a university published articles between 2006 and 2010. The source is Journal Impact Factors of ISI. The weight of this indicator is %18.

Journal Citation Impact Total: is the measure of received citation quality which is based on the impact factors of journals where the citing articles are published. The source is Journal Impact Factors of ISI while the contribution of this indicator to the overall ranking is %15.

International Collaboration: is a measure of global acceptance of a university. International collaboration data, which is based on the total number of publications made in collaboration with foreign universities, is obtained from the ISI database for the years 2006-2010. The weight of this indicator is %15 in the overall ranking.

Methodology