Ghanaian Universities have always been a major destination for tertiary education within West Africa. A recent report by the US News & World report has adjudged the Kwame Nkrumah University (KNUST) as the best university in West Africa, 14th best in Africa and 706th best in the world.
This report might put an end to the decade long debate about which university in Ghana is the best. Students of the University of Ghana might not agree but this well researched report by the US News & World Report should be enough evidence of the hard work that KNUST has been doing over the years.
Could the recent sex for grades saga which rocked the University of Ghana be a cause to them not toping the chart? Maybe. But this is what we know about how KNUST won this prestigious award.
Ranking the best University in West Africa
The U.S. News and World Report is a well known organisation that has been around for the past 86 years. They normally rank universities based in their research performance and its ratings by members of the academic community globally. These rankings help prospective students to make an informed choice on which university to attend.
Ranking factors
The first step in producing these rankings, which are powered by Clarivate Analytics Incites, involved creating a pool of 1,599 Universities that is used to rank the top 1,500 schools. The second step is to calculate the rankings using the 13 indicators and weights that U.S. News chose to measure global research performance.
Each of the 1,500 top-ranked university’s profile pages on usnews.com lists the overall global score as well as numerical ranks for the 13 indicators, allowing students, academics and university leaders to compare each university’s standing in each indicator.
These indicators include;
- global research reputation
- regional research reputation
- publications
- books authored
- conference papers
- normalised citation impact
- total citations
- number of publications that are among the 10% most cited
- percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited
- international collaboration – relative to country
- international collaboration
- number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited in their respective field
- percentage of total publications that are among the top 1% most highly cited papers
- general reputation.
With a global score of 42.4, KNUST had a global reputation for research of 1,044, regional research reputation of 21. It also obtained 1,572 publications, 1,189 books, 1,444 conferences, 33 normalisation citation impact and a total citation of 1,0409.
In addition, KNUST attained 949 percentage of total publications that are among the 10 per cent most cited, 381 International collaborations – relative to country, and 15 International collaborations. This latest ranking projects KNUST as the best University for teaching, learning and research in Ghana and West Africa as a whole.
The U.S. News & World Report is a multi-platform publisher of news and information, which includes; annual print and e-book versions of its authoritative rankings of Best Colleges, Best Graduate Schools and Best Hospitals in the World