The Jagiellonian University was again recognised as one of the leading European higher education institutions in terms of innovation by Thomson Reuters. The oldest Polish university has retained 90th place in Top 100: Europe’s Most Innovative Universities and is still the only institution from Poland and the entire Central-Eastern Europe included on this prestigious list.
The ranking is based on the analysis of research publications and patent data from the period 2012-2017. It includes both traditional and technical universities.
Clarivate Analytics – a company which gathered the data for the ranking – identified over 600 organisations that published the highest number of papers in academic journals and then reduced the list to include only those institutions which filed at least 50 patent applications with the World Intellectual Property Organisation between 2012 and 2017. Each candidate was then evaluated according to ten different criteria.
The following steps consisted in assessing the extent to which these efforts resulted in obtaining patents, and gauging the rate at which a university’s patents were cited in other patent applications. These data indicated an institution’s influence in ongoing research and development. The analysis also included gauging how frequently research papers from a given university are cited in patent applications, in order to assess the link between the institution’s basic research and its practical applications.
Presenting the Jagiellonian University’s profile, Thomson Reuters pointed out to the collaboration of JU chemists with Chinese scientists aimed at designing a new generation of catalytic converters reducing the amount of pollutants emitted by diesel engines by over 90 percent, as well as the heart surgery with the use of holographic imaging technology performed in 2018 in the University Hospital in Kraków.
The list was topped by the Belgian KU Leuven, followed by Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany), whereas the third and fourth places were taken by British institutions: Imperial College London and the University of Cambridge.
