In the 2019 edition of the Reuters Top 100: Europe’s Most Innovative Universities the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya · BarcelonaTech (UPC) ranks 81st in the list, which is six places higher than in the previous edition, and achieves its best results ever in the ranking. The UPC ranks 2nd in Spain and 1st among Spanish technical universities.



The ranking was drawn up in collaboration with Clarivate Analytics. First, they selected the institutions with the largest number of publications in the Web of Science between 2012 and 2017 and excluded those with less than 50 patents filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in that period. Then they considered a number of scientific output indicators —the impact of cited scientific papers in patents or the business sector, the percentage of papers that featured a coauthor from industry and the total number of publications—and indicators regarding patents filed by the institutions—the global number of patents, granted patents, international patents and citations, the impact of cited patents and the percentage of patents cited by other patents.

Among the 100 classified universities, 23 are in Germany, 21 in the United Kingdom, 18 in France, 9 in the Netherlands, 7 in Belgium, 5 in Spain (3 in Catalonia) and Switzerland, 4 in Italy, 3 in Denmark, 2 in Norway and 1 in Austria, Ireland and Poland. The leaders of the ranking are KU Leuven, the University of Erlangen Nuremberg, Imperial College London, the University of Cambridge and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne.