March 8, 2017

Subject success in world rankings

UOW surges in QS World University Ranking by Subject results. 

The latest round of university rankings data released today (Wednesday 8 March) has placed UOW among the world’s best in several subject fields, with minerals and mining engineering the University’s top performer.

Since 2011, the annual QS World University Rankings by Subject assess and rank the world’s top universities based on their academic reputation, employer reputation and research impact across 46 subjects, grouped into five broad subject areas.

UOW this year features among the world's elite institutions in 25 of the 46 subjects assessed and is represented across all five broad subject areas. This marks an improvement on last year’s results that saw UOW ranked in 19 out of 42 subjects assessed in 2016.

UOW’s strongest performance was in the Engineering and Technology subject area, ranking 26th in the world for Mineral and Mining Engineering.

In 2017 UOW has qualified for rankings in some subjects for the first time, with debuts in Art and Design, Agriculture and Forestry, Psychology, Physics, Law and Biology. These results have contributed to UOW improving its overall rankings in the Arts and Humanities and Life Sciences and Medicine subject areas compared with 2016.

UOW Vice-Chancellor, Professor Paul Wellings, CBE, said the latest QS rankings confirmed Wollongong’s standing as a comprehensive university.

“We are seeing a consistent trend of strong performance across world rankings in an environment that is becoming increasingly competitive,” he said.

“Results like these not only reinforce our standing in fields which are our traditional strengths, such as Engineering, but also highlight the positive progress we’re making in other fields such as medicine, life sciences, arts and humanities.

“This is an important step as we continue our quest to reach the top one per cent of universities worldwide.”

In November last year UOW was ranked by QS in the world’s top one per cent for graduate employability and in September 2016 UOW was ranked as the world’s 12th best young University. Prior to that, UOW jumped 25 places to rank at number 218 in the QS World University Rankings, placing it among Australia’s top 10 universities.

The results were informed by the expert opinion of 305,000 academics and 194,000 employers, alongside an analysis of 43 million research papers and over 185 million citations sourced from the Scopus/Elsevier bibliometric database.