The University Ranking by Academic Performance (URAP) is a global university ranking system developed by the Informatics Institute of Middle East Technical University. It ranks universities based on their academic performance using a variety of indicators, including research quality, citation impact, and international collaboration. URAP is a relatively new ranking system, but it has quickly become one of the most comprehensive and respected rankings in the world. 

The URAP ranking system's focus is on academic quality. URAP has gathered data about 3,000 Higher Education Institutes (HEI) in an effort to rank these organizations by their academic performance. The overall score of each HEI is based upon its performance over several indicators which are described in the Ranking Indicators section. The ranking includes HEIs except for governmental academic institutions, e.g. the Chinese Academy of Science and the Russian Academy of Science, etc. Data for 3,000 HEIs have been processed and top 2,500 of them are scored. Thus, URAP covers approximately 12% of all HEIs in the world, which makes it one of the most comprehensive university ranking systems in the world.

URAP ranking system is completely based on objective data obtained from reliable open sources. The system ranks the universities according to multiple criteria. Most of the currently available ranking systems are both size and subject dependent. The AIT and CIT indicators aim to minimize the influence of differences among publication trends across disciplines by providing subject level adjustment. As of 2017, URAP employed a new filter for the article and citation indicators to promote publication quality by focusing on articles published in journals that are listed within the first, second and third quartiles in terms of their Journal Impact Factor within their respective subject areas. The URAP research team is continuously working on new methods to improve the existing indicators.

The goal of the URAP ranking system is not to label world universities as best or worst. Our intention is to help universities identify potential areas of progress with respect to specific academic performance indicators. Similar to other ranking systems, the URAP system is neither exhaustive nor definitive, and is open to new ideas and improvements. The current ranking system will be continuously upgraded based on our ongoing research and the constructive feedback of our colleagues.