TEHRAN (Iran News) –According to an early release from the 2023 edition of the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) Global Innovation Index (GII), Tehran ranks 34th among the top 100 Science and Technology (S&T) clusters in the world.

Every year, the S&T Cluster ranking of the GlI identifies local concentrations of world-leading science and technology activity. S&T clusters are established through the analysis of patent-filing activity and scientific article publication, documenting the geographical areas around the world with the highest density of inventors and scientific authors.

WIPO locates and ranks science and technology clusters through a geocoding method, mapping addresses and names pulled from documents with 96 percent accuracy.

Science and technology clusters are among the most critical components for the innovation performance of any economy. By bringing science, businesses, and entrepreneurs together, these cities or regions are able to build an ecosystem that translates scientific ideas into on-the-ground impact.

Tehran filed 37 patent applications and 9,320 scientific articles, both per 1 million inhabitants, over the last five years, making it the 34th largest science and technology cluster in 2023.

It is placed higher than cities such as Melbourne (42nd), Madrid (48th), Zurich (49th), Milan (50th), Toronto (52nd), and Istanbul (59th), ISNA reported.

University of Tehran, Islamic Azad University, and Amir Kabir University had the largest share of publishing articles in Tehran with 12 percent, 9 percent, and 8 percent share, respectively.

According to the WIPO assessment, 63 thousand 113 articles were published in Tehran from 2017 to 2022, 25 percent of which are related to technical and engineering fields.

The world’s five biggest S&T clusters are all located in East Asia with the San Jose-San Francisco cluster in the US at number six.

Tokyo-Yokohama (Japan) leads as the largest global S&T cluster, followed by Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou (China and Hong Kong, China), and Seoul (Republic of Korea), followed by China’s Beijing and Shanghai-Suzhou clusters.

Academic rankings

Multiple organizations annually rank universities around the world based on different criteria.

Each system takes into account specific metrics including scientific impact, international faculty members, elite students, number of professors and students winning scientific awards, graduate employment, scientific inventions, and validity of the published articles in specific time intervals.

In September, Iranian higher education institutions once again demonstrated their global prominence, with 18 universities making their mark in the prestigious “Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities,” also known as the “Taiwan Ranking,” released annually by the National Taiwan University.

The University of Tehran has emerged as the torchbearer of Iranian academia, securing an impressive global ranking of 286 in the 2023 Taiwan Ranking. This distinction cements the University of Tehran’s reputation as a world-class institution committed to research excellence.

In August, the second edition of the Webometrics ranking 2023 of the World Universities ranked 440 Iranian institutions among 30,000 top universities worldwide.

Tehran University, ranked 305 in the world, is the top among Iranian institutions on the list followed by Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences.

The first edition of the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities 2023, in June, ranked 457 Iranian institutions among around 32,000 top universities across the world.

The University of Tehran tops the list of Iranian universities included in this ranking, followed by Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, and Sharif University of Technology.

Universities (ARWU), also known as Shanghai Ranking, placed ten universities from Iran among the top 1000 universities in the world in the Shanghai Ranking, 2023, according to the head of the Islamic World Science Citation Center (ISC).

The University of Tehran is among the top 500 universities in the world with a rank of 401-500, the best among Iranian universities, the ISC head Ahmad Fazelzadeh said, IRIB reported.

In the 2023 edition of the Times Higher Education Young University Rankings which includes 605 universities, Iran became the third most represented nation with 39 institutions.

The latest edition of the QS World University Rankings placed seven Iranian universities among the world’s top institutes.

The Leiden ranking system published the 2023 report, according to which 46 Iranian universities were among the 1,411 top universities in the world. Among Islamic countries, Iran ranked first, followed by Turkey and Egypt with 36 and 13 universities, respectively.

In the 2023 edition of the Times Higher Education’s Asian University Ranking System, 669 institutions from 31 Asian countries are included and 65 Iranian universities are among the top Asian institutions.