Boston University has been named 37th among 500 Best Global Universities in a U.S. News & World Report ranking that compares the academic research and reputation of institutions around the world. The rankings, published in October, considered 750 universities in 49 countries.

“This new ranking from U.S. News & World Report demonstrates how strong our global competitiveness is,” says Jean Morrison, University provost. “It reflects the outstanding performance of our faculty, whose commitment to excellence in scholarship and groundbreaking research continues to place BU in a very enviable spot both nationally and globally.”

The report cites BU’s global score of 66, based on 10 indicators that include global and regional research reputation, percentage of highly cited papers, international collaboration, number of PhDs awarded, and number of PhDs awarded per faculty member. The University was also ranked in comparison with other leading institutions on a range of academic subjects, from medicine to economics to neuroscience to environment/ecology. In these categories BU fared best in social sciences and public health, with a ranking of 25, followed closely by physics, clinical medicine, and molecular biology, which received rankings of 30, 30, and 33, respectively.

U.S. News emphasizes that none of the data from its annual Best Colleges rankings, which most recently put BU at number 42 among US colleges, is used in the Best Global Universities rankings and that the methodology used to compute the Best Global Universities rankings differs from those used for Best Colleges and Best Graduate Schools.

Praise for Law Faculty

The School of Law continues to win high marks from the Princeton Review, placing second in the “best professors” category in the 2015 rankings (Duke was number one) and seventh in “best classroom” experience among the 169 law schools surveyed by the test preparation and college admissions resources firm.

The Princeton Review surveyed 19,500-plus law students nationally and collected information from school administrators to come up with its annual rankings in 11 categories. Other categories besides professors and classroom experience included “best career prospects,” “toughest to get into,” “best quality of life,” and “most diverse faculty.”