University: Sant'Anna and Normale di Pisa in World Top 200
Florence - The two parts of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa Sant'Anna and Normale are the only Italian universities to feature among the top 200 in the world (155th and 184th, respectively) according to the new ranking published on September 5 by the British "Times Higher Education" magazine, specialized in analyzing and evaluating university systems. With this position on world level, Sant'Anna and Normale are in the top 100 in Europe, which still includes universities in Britain. The new ranking counts over one thousand universities in 77 countries. The classification is led by Oxford university, with Cambridge jumping up to second place. The California Institute of Technology shares third place with Stanford University. Europe, including the UK, is still home to 100 of the 200 top universities in the world, but Asian institutions, Chinese in particular, are gaining positions with respect to the previous ranking, paying back the significant research investments of their governments. In Europe, worth noting are the two new number ones in Spain and Italy, the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona and the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna di Pisa, respectively. For Italy, the fluctuation is all within the Pisa Schools of Advanced Studies system, with the Normale, soon to federate with the Sant'Anna and with the IUSS of Pavia, in second place confirming its global competitiveness. The ranking was drawn up on the basis of five "pillars": teaching, research, citations, international outlook and industry income, meaning the transfer of technology and knowledge towards the industrial system. Analysts identified a number of additional indicators for each pillar; the final ranking took the sizing of the universities and the national reference context into account to standardize the evaluation and balance out the differences between systems. The "rigorous standards", as they were defined by the editor of "Times Higher Education" Phil Baty, were integrated with evaluation prerequisites for each of the one thousand universities, such as the target of at least one thousand international scientific publications by teachers and researchers over the past five years. Sant'Anna and Normale achieved positive results across the five pillars, with strengths in research quality and particular focus on the number of citations of the articles published by teachers and researchers.