QS - Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings 2020: Sant'Anna School achieves the world’s top 10 for research impact (“Citations per Faculty” indicator) and the world’s top 100 for Faculty/Student ratio
Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies records noteworthy results as per the 16th edition of the QS World University Rankings, released today. Education analysts of agency QS Quacquarelli Symonds ranked the world’s top 1000 universities. According to the latest 2020 report, Sant’Anna has risen tenth place in the world for the “Citations per Faculty” indicator that measures the impact of research on the number of researchers. It is an exceptional performance, as they said, reflecting the quality of research and making Sant’Anna Italy’s second best university with the University of Bologna. The Politecnico di Milano - Milan Polytechnic is the first Italian university in the top 200: in this 16th edition of the QS World University Rankings, only Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna and Scuola Normale Superiore place among the global top 100 for the “Faculty/Student” ratio.
Other Italian universities are among the top 700 in the world. Of the 34 Italian universities, four more than in the previous year, included in this year’s ranking, none has matched the performance of the Politecnico di Milano who is ranked Italy’s best university for the fifth year in a row. With 34 classified universities, Italy is the seventh largest country in the world and third in the European Union after the United Kingdom (84) and Germany (47) and ahead of France (31) and Spain (27).
Of the top universities ranked in the overall QS World University Rankings, Boston's Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT was ranked the world's best university, for a record eighth consecutive year, followed by Stanford University and Harvard University.
The 2020 QS World University Rankings surveyed more than 94,000 academics and 44,000 human resource managers to rank the world’s top universities from 82 countries. It includes the analysis of 11.8 million scientific publications and 100 million citations. In addition, data on the distribution of 23 million students and about 2 million teachers and researchers were evaluated to compile the ranking. Last year, more than 70 million students used the QS world’s most-consulted university ranking.
Ben Sowter, Director of QS Intelligence Unit, said: “The Politecnico di Milano is continuing to climb up the top 150 world university rankings and Sant'Anna Pisa places among the top 10 based on the the impact of research. Italy has exceptional university performance and we hope that its ruling class will support it with appropriate investment and far-sighted policies."
Sabina Nuti, Rector of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, commented: “This year’s results demonstrate a consistent university-wide commitment to excellence and academic performance. My predecessor Professor Pierdomenico Perata, has sustained our institution upward trajectory in teaching, research and innovation. This achievement is in line with our mission to be recognised as a model for research. Achievement is about challenging situations and our accomplishments are even more impressive when considering that our small university has celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2017. As Ben Sowter said, our strategic plan resulted in exceptional improvement”.
“We see the continued progressions made by our institution under scientific publications, citations, academic reputation and, mainly, peer reviews indicators. It is deeply rewarding to see our academic standards and highly international outlook are recognised in these rankings. These results are reflective of our expertise in a small variety of areas such as Economics and Management, Law, Political Science, Engineering, IT, Medicine, Agriculture and Biotechnology. Such outcomes for 150 academic staff and less than 250 research fellows demonstrate our ability to meet academic standards and quality”.
“As a future world-class institution, our challenge is to increase investment in frontier research combining our traditional educational role with the transfer of knowledge from research to external partners. In the years ahead, we will face larger trends in the university community engaging with society and expanding our third mission of creating value”.
