Universities metaranking. Positioning of the Spanish universities

This study proposes the elaboration of a meta-ranking, including the 14 Spanish universities which appear in at least four of the five global rankings considered in this study, that are some of the world’s most influential. It is necessary to differentiate between research rakings that use bibliometric data and rankings that take into account other aspects and other forms of data collection, basically based on surveys. Spanish universities attain better positions in the first group. The investigation highlighted that the higher weaknesses we can find are in the internationalization, the reputation or in the student-teacher ratio. The one exception is for universities that stand out in the two dimensions. Regarding the outcome, there is an evident need for a greater internationalisation, to improve the reputation of the higher education institutions and to enhance the international visibility of the Spanish universities