Universities and research institutes in Iran have been ranked under a new rating system devised by the by the Islamic World Science Citation Center(ISC) in the country, based on their activities during the period June to December 2010.

Research (50%), educational performance (35%), international co-operation (7%) and socio-economic impact (5%) are the key parameters at the heart of the new system that has been devised for all Islamic universities by the ISC.

According to reports in University World News, the top 5 institutions in Iran as ranked by the ISC are University of Tehran, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Sharif University of Technology, AmirKabir University of Technology and Iran University of Science and Technology.

The new rankings are expected to increase the visibility and citation of research done in Islamic universities across the world, which is difficult to capture entirely through international databases such as ISI, Scopus and Google Scholar. This is because many of the journals published in the Islamic countries - especially those in languages other than English - are not usually available on the popular international databases.

ISC, on the other hand, extracts data both from direct contact with universities as well as from their research journals compiled in the ISC subsystems. Languages recognized by USC are English, Farsi and Arabic. Thus the new rankings could lead to enhancement of the profiles of the Islamic Universities, especially among the international education fraternity.

Google