Abstract:

The Shanghai ranking is one of the most widely recognized evaluation criteria in the university world, and one of the most influential when it comes to assessing the international projection of different universities. To this purpose, 1500 out of 20000 higher education institutions are evaluated within a global context, and the ranking includes the 500 best universities of them. The University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) entered in 2012 in that group of excellence where the top 500 best universities in the world can be found.

In the last edition of the Shanghai ranking, in 2020, UPV/EHU was already ranked among the top 400. In fact, there are some academic specialties among the top 200. These specialities include classical ones as Chemistry or Chemical Engineering, and cutting-edge ones like Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. Along with these outstanding specialties, the UPV/EHU also achieves good positions, among the 300 best universities in the world, in Environmental Science and Engineering, Energy Science and Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, Agricultural Sciences, Pharmacy, Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Education. As observed, most of them belong to the field of pure sciences and engineering.

One of the dynamics in which the UPV/EHU has been working in recent years is the collaboration with external agents. Collaborative activities have been carried out in many ways, and one of the outstanding one is the supervision of doctoral theses. As a result, the number of theses supervised by personnel from outside the UPV/EHU is growing. The number of doctoral theses is one of the factors considered in the Shanghai ranking, and taking the latter into account, it is necessary to analyze the influence of the participation of external thesis supervisors on it. Thus, this work analyzes the distribution of these supervisors by the different areas of knowledge and their relationship with the number of theses defended. The methodology followed includes the theses defended between 2016 and 2020. The results show that, in the studied 66 UPV/EHU doctoral programs, there are 3296 potential supervisors, and 32.4% of them are external. However, the percentage of them who have participated in the direction of theses in recent years is 17.7%. Additionally, these supervisors are unevenly distributed among the different areas of knowledge, and this is related to the outstanding specialities for UPV/EHU in the in the Shanghai ranking.

Keywords:

Thesis supervision, external supervisors, fields of knowldge.