The SCImago Institutions Rankings (SIR) is a classification of academic and research-related institutions ranked by a composite indicator that combines three different sets of indicators based on research performance, innovation outputs and societal impact measured by their web visibility.
It provides a friendly interface that allows the visualization of any customized ranking from the combination of these three sets of indicators. Additionally, it is possible to compare the trends for individual indicators of up to six institutions. For each large sector it is also possible to obtain distribution charts of the different indicators.
For comparative purposes, the value of the composite indicator has been set on a scale of 0 to 100. However the line graphs and bar graphs always represent ranks (lower is better, so the highest values are the worst).
In the 2023 edition, the way of numbering the ranks of the institutions in the ranking has changed...
The new numbering system maintains the same numerical ranks (positions) when the institutions are matched in the value of their indicator, and jumps as many ranks as institutions are tied. In this way, the number of ranks coincide approximately with the number of institutions. This change has been applied retrospectively to previous editions to allow the realistic comparison and observation of the evolution of institutions over time.
For the SIR Ranking 2024 edition, the Societal Factor has been modified to include 3 new indicators that reflect more specifically the societal impact achieved by an institution: among them, the generation of new knowledge related to the Sustainable Development Goals defined by the United Nations, the participation of women in research processes and the use of the results obtained in the creation or improvement of public policies.
For the SIR Ranking 2026 edition, the Altmetrics indicator has been replaced by the new Media Mentions metric. This indicator quantifies institutional exposure across high-authority media outlets indexed in the SCImago Media Rankings (SMR). Detailed methodology for this indicator can be consulted in the indicators section.
A total of 61 universities in the SIR 2026 edition have been flagged for high rates of self-citation (over 25%) and self-referencing (over 15%). These factors can severely affect ranking positions and, as a result, IRIS considers these institutions to be at risk regarding integrity. For this reason, these universities may be removed from the SIR in subsequent editions.
In order to achieve the highest level of precision for the different indicators, an extensive manual process of disambiguation of the institution’s names has been carried out. The development of an assessment tool for bibliometric analysis aimed to characterize research institutions involves an enormous data processing task related to the identification and disambiguation of institutions through the institutional affiliation of documents included in Scopus. The objective of SCImago, in this respect, is twofold....
Thoroughness in the identification of institutional affiliations is one of the key values of the guaranteed standardization process, in any case, the highest possible levels of disambiguation.
Institutions can be grouped by the countries to which they belong. Multinational institutions (MUL) which cannot be attributed to any country have also been included.
The institutions marked with an asterisk consist of a group of sub-institutions, identified by with the abbreviated name of the parent institution. The parent institutions show the results of all of their sub-institutions.
Institutions can be also grouped by sectors (Universities, Health, Government,… ).
For the ranking purposes, the calculation is generated each year from the results obtained over a period of five year ending two years before the edition of the ranking. For instance, if the selected year of publication is 2024, the results used are those from the five year period 2018-2022. The only exception is the case of web indicators which have been calculated once the last year.
The inclusion criterions are:
The source of information used for the indicators for innovation is PATSTAT database.
The sources of information used for the indicators for web visibility are Google and Semrush.
Unpaywall database is used to identify Open Access documents.
Altmetrics from PlumX metrics and Mendeley are used for Societal Factor.
The Overton database is used to identify documents cited in policy documents.
The SIR is from now a LEAGUE TABLE. The aim of SIR is to provide a useful metric tool for institutions, policymakers and research managers for the analysis, evaluation and improvement of their activities, outputs and outcomes.
Best Quartile is obtained by the institution in its country comparing the quartiles based on the overall indicator, research factor, innovation factor and societal factor.
Indicators are divided into three groups intended to reflect scientific, economic and social characteristics of institutions. The SIR includes both, size-dependent and size-independent indicators; that is indicators influenced and not influenced by the size of the institutions. In this manner, the SIR provides overall statistics of the scientific publication and other output of institutions, at the same time that enables comparisons between institutions of different sizes. It needs to be kept in mind that, once the final indicator has been calculated out of the combination of the different indicators (to which a different weigh has been assigned) the resulting values have been normalized on a scale of 0 to 100.
Scientific output and excellence. Includes 11 indicators.
Knowledge transfer and technology. Includes 3 indicators.
Web visibility and social footprint. Includes 6 indicators.
| Factor | Indicator | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Research (50%) | Normalized Impact (NI) | 13% |
| Excellence with Leadership (EwL) | 8% | |
| Output (O) | 8% | |
| Scientific Leadership (L) | 5% | |
| Not Own Journals (NotOJ) | 3% | |
| Own Journals (OJ) | 3% | |
| Excellence (Exc) | 2% | |
| High Quality Publications (Q1) | 2% | |
| International Collaboration (IC) | 2% | |
| Open Access (OA) | 2% | |
| Scientific Talent Pool (STP) | 2% | |
| Innovation (30%) | Innovative Knowledge (IK) | 10% |
| Patents (PT) | 10% | |
| Technological Impact (TI) | 10% | |
| Societal (20%) | Media Mentions (MM) | 3% |
| Web Size (WS) | 3% | |
| Authority Score (AScore) | 3% | |
| Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) | 5% | |
| Female Scientific Talent Pool (FemSTP) | 3% | |
| Impact in public policy - Overton (OV) | 3% |
