These are the 10 best Spanish universities in scientific production

The newspaper Teaching has presented the Scimago Institutions Rankings (SIR) report, which assesses the volume of research activity carried out in universities and other research institutions in Latin America, taking as a reference the Scopus scientific database.

The presentation has been carried out by Felix de Moya, founder of the Scimago Group and responsible for the report.

Each year, since 2009, the Scimago Research Group publishes the Ranking of Institutions SIR Latin America which considers all higher education institutions -public and private- in Latin America, Spain and Portugal with at least one publication in SCOPUS (1753 institutions in total).

For this, a battery of indicators that reveal the research performance of the universities is collected, with the aim of becoming a framework for evaluating their research activity.

We also find the excellence ratio, which deals with the amount of scientific production of a university that has been included in the group of 10% of the most cited works in its scientific field; just like him leadership ranking, which is the production of a university in which this is "the main contributor" or, in other words, the number of jobs in which the corresponding author belongs to the university.

The report also includes the international collaboration wave standard citation, among other indicators.

In the case of Spain, the report states that the 10 institutions with the highest scientific output are:

1. University of Barcelona
2. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
3. Complutense University of Madrid
4. University of Valencia
5. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
6. Autonomous University of Madrid
7. University of Granada
8. Universitat Politècnica de València
9. University of Seville
10. Polytechnic University of Madrid

Main conclusions of the SIR Iberoamerica

Over the years the number of institutions has increased steadily of Ibero-American higher education with scientific activity present in the Scopus database. From the first version published in 2009 to the last, around 300 universities (17%) have begun their publication journeys in international scientific circuits, which highlights the great effort what is being done from the region to join the mainstream of world science. The evolution of Latin America and Latin America is quite similar over time.

There are three groups of countries clearly differentiated according to the number of higher education institutions with a presence in the Ibero-American SIR. Brazil significantly increases the number of universities with presence in Scopus between the SIR Iber version of 2009 and the last one; Colombia also increases its number as of 2013. On the contrary, in Argentina and Venezuela show a decrease in the number of institutions with production in international journals. Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Chile, Puerto Rico, Uruguay and Jamaica maintain a similar production throughout the period. And finally, Cuba manages to appear in the ranking of 2009 with a single university.

Almost half of Ibero-American higher education institutions are concentrated in Two unique countries, Brazil and Mexico, followed by Colombia and Spain, and below 100 universities, there are also Argentina, Portugal, Venezuela, Peru and Chile. The rest of the countries in the region are below.

Isabel Martínez