VU is found in the list of 500 best universities of the world in the broad subject areas of natural sciences (ranked 401–450), social sciences and management (ranked 401–450), and arts and humanities (ranked 451–500).
In the field of humanities, linguistics remains the best ranked subject in Vilnius University for the fourth year in a row. This year it is placed in 251-300 position, meanwhile, in the subject area of natural sciences, the subject field of physics and astronomy has also retained its position for four successive years (301-350). In addition, the chemical engineering subject field has been excellently evaluated for the second year in a row (351-400).
Business management, mathematics, biological sciences and medicine study fields are in the top 500 in the world. This year, VU was evaluated in the study field of economics and econometrics for the first time, according to which it was placed in 401-450 position.
In terms of the h-index, which is used to measure the significance of scholarly publications, as usual, physics and astronomy (72.7 points out of 100) and natural sciences (68.9 points), also business and management (66.3 points), medicine (63.6 points) and statistics and operational research (63.5 points) were evaluated best.
To compile the QS World University Rankings by Subject, a total of 1,453 educational institutions globally were evaluated in terms of 51 study fields in five broad subject areas: arts and humanities, engineering and technology, life sciences and medicine, natural sciences and social sciences and management.
Universities are ranked based on the following criteria: evaluation of academic personnel, evaluation by employers, citation rate of scientific publications, h-index which is designed to measure productivity and citation impact of published scientific works globally. Academic staff evaluation is the most important as it has the greatest impact on the final ranking. Teachers of communication and media studies at VU receive the highest scores in this indicator.
