The 2025 Times Higher Education Interdisciplinary Science Rankings (ISR) are in, and the University of Malta has been ranked. They are the largest-ever debut rankings, with 1,023 universities participating from over 90 countries. Only 749 universities met the ISR eligibility criteria and were ranked, while the remaining 274 universities were included as ‘reporter’ institutions and were not assigned a rank number.

We are delighted to announce that UM has been ranked in the 501-600 band out of 1,023 institutions in this first edition of the THE’s Interdisciplinary Science Rankings 2025. The results demonstrate UM’s genuine commitment to interdisciplinary sciences while underscoring the critical importance of fostering further collaboration on impactful scientific matters

The inaugural Interdisciplinary Science Rankings, which were released on Thursday 21 November 2024, measure global universities’ contributions and commitment to interdisciplinary science. They are the first global effort at interdisciplinary science ranking, responding to the view that global issues can be resolved with insights from a range of scholarly fields.

The ISR methodology consists of three pillars, namely inputs, process and outputs, each representing a stage in the lifecycle of research projects. Each pillar is then divided into metrics to measure different aspects, with 11 metrics in total. This data submission is followed by the THE Interdisciplinary Science Ranking reputation survey which was distributed to UM researchers who actively responded by the stipulated deadline. THE data sources also draw on bibliometric data provided by Elsevier’s Scopus database that includes more than 30,000 active peer-reviewed, indexed journals.

A more detailed description of how the rankings are measured is available online.

The ISR 2025 were launched in association with Schmidt Science Fellows, an elite globally-recognised Fellowship consisting of a community of scientists and supporters of interdisciplinary sciences from across the world.