UNIST Maintains Unrivaled No. 1 in Paper Quality in Korea... Dominates in Research Competitiveness

UNIST (President Park Jongrae) has maintained its position as the top university in South Korea for nine consecutive years in the Netherlands-based Leiden Ranking, which evaluates the quality of academic papers.

By consistently producing high-level research results, UNIST has once again demonstrated the global competitiveness of its academic publications.

The Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University announced the "2025 Leiden Ranking" on October 29, local time. In the "Traditional Edition," which calculates rankings based on SCI paper performance using the same methodology as before, UNIST ranked first in South Korea and 203rd globally, with 12.6% of its papers in the top 10% by citation.

Since first entering the rankings in 2017, UNIST has firmly held the top spot in South Korea for nine consecutive years. This year, even though the proportion of top-ranked papers slightly decreased compared to the previous year, UNIST maintained its first-place position, demonstrating its research competitiveness.

Notably, UNIST also ranked first domestically in the "fractional counting" category, which calculates contribution based on the number of co-authors. This result confirms that the actual contribution of UNIST researchers is the highest in South Korea.

UNIST's performance was also remarkable in subject-specific rankings. Among the five detailed academic fields, UNIST published the most papers in Physical Science and Engineering, maintaining its top domestic position for another year. In the Life and Earth Science field, UNIST's global ranking rose by 43 places from the previous year, placing it within the top 130 worldwide.

UNIST researchers are discussing semiconductor development processes in the Nano Device Processing Laboratory.

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The traditional Leiden Ranking evaluates the qualitative proportion of papers based on the number of SCI papers published by each university and the number of those papers ranked in the top 10% by citation. Only universities that have published more than 800 SCI papers over four years are eligible for listing.

The 2025 evaluation included 1,594 universities from 77 countries worldwide and 52 universities from South Korea. The assessment period covered papers published between 2020 and 2023. During the evaluation process, the contribution ratio for co-authored papers was adjusted to carefully assess each university's actual contribution.

In this year's evaluation, MIT ranked first globally. Princeton University, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Harvard University, and Stanford University rounded out the top five, continuing the strong performance of American universities.

Among South Korean universities, UNIST ranked first, followed by POSTECH, KAIST, Sejong University, and Yeungnam University in the top five.

President Park Jongrae stated, "This achievement demonstrates that UNIST continues to produce outstanding research that attracts global attention," adding, "We will continue to grow as a university that leads the flow of global science and technology through challenging and creative research."

UNIST campus.

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