Since 2010, it has been publishing annual national[3] and global[4] college and university rankings for top 2000 institutions.
The scientometrics measurement of URAP is based on data obtained from the Institute for Scientific Information via Web of Science and inCites.
In addition to global rankings, URAP publishes regional rankings for universities in Turkey using additional indicators such as the number of students and faculty members obtained from Center of Measuring, Selection and Placement ÖSYM.
URAP gathers data from international bibliometric databases such as Web of Science and InCites provided by the Institute for Scientific Information.
URAP uses data of 2,500 Higher Education Institutions (HEI) with highest number of articles published.
The raw bibliometric data underlying URAP's 6 main indicators have highly skewed distribution.
The Delphi system was conducted with a group of experts to assign weighting scores to the indicators.
URAP uses additional indicators for ranking universities in Turkey including the number of students and faculty members.
The total document count covers all scholarly literature provided by the Web of Science database, including conference papers, reviews, letters, discussions, scripts, and journal articles.
In the “World University Ranking Systems: An Alternative Approach Using Partial Least Squares Path Modeling”[16] article, published in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, Urap is incorporated in the suggested model as one of the nine major worldwide university ranking systems along with ARWU, QS, Times, Webometrics, Taiwan.
In the same article, URAP is categorized among the ranking systems that are based solely on publication performance.
The following is a list of some of the books, peer reviewed articles, and conference proceedings that have covered URAP or have incorporated it in their models or comparisons.
Annual URAP ranking results are used by a number of listed universities to indicate their academic performance.
The indicators used in URAP are absolute values and size-dependent making it biased towards larger institutions.
[15][17] According to the “EUA report on Ranking for 2013“ published by the European University Association, URAP disregards books, excludes studies in arts and humanities areas, and under-represents social sciences.
Furthermore, URAP does not employ any compensation for different publication cultures due to the lack of field-normalization of the results of bibliometric indicators.
The report further states that “The results of the indicator on citation numbers in particular, as well as those on publication counts, are thus skewed towards the natural sciences and especially medicine.” It also states that excluding teaching indicators by URAP makes its focus solely on research-oriented institutions.
It states that “It [URAP] lists 2000 universities, and the purpose is to provide a ranking that covers not only institutions in the Western elite group.
This purpose contrasts starkly with other ranking producers’ decisions not to publish more than the 400-500 top positions of their lists, since they do not consider their methods reliable below that level.