In addition to the traditional ranking, Leiden University also released the Leiden Ranking Open Edition, which classifies universities based on open data from OpenAlex – an open-access bibliographic catalog that compiles information on scientific articles, authors, institutions, and sources, developed by the nonprofit organization OurResearch. In this ranking, USP placed 19th among more than 2,831 universities worldwide, rising five positions compared with 2024, the year the ranking was first introduced.
This edition provides a more inclusive perspective by considering non-core publications. According to the CWTS website, “the profile of the University of São Paulo, one of the largest universities in the Global South, in the Leiden Ranking Open Edition, shows that, considering only core publications, the University has 48,926 publications from 2020 to 2023. This number increases to 68,889 when non-core publications are also included, indicating that about one-third of the University’s scientific output is excluded when adopting the traditional perspective of core publications”.
CWTS also notes that “the case of the University of São Paulo demonstrates how the 2025 edition of the Leiden Ranking Open Edition offers a broader and more inclusive perspective in terms of scientific coverage, multilingualism, and bibliodiversity”.
The traditional edition includes all universities with at least 800 core publications in the Web of Science database from 2020 to 2023. The open edition includes all universities with at least 1,500 publications – core and non-core – in the OpenAlex database during the same period.
This edition also evaluates scientific impact, collaboration, and the number of open-access publications.
