علی توکلیان

Considering the increasing importance of knowledge and its impact on the development of today's societies, we can see the importance and effective role of universities that strive to gather knowledge in various fields and reproduce it. Universities have entered a competitive environment with each other to gain as much knowledge as possible and use the benefits it can bring, which has led to the emergence of numerous ranking systems of universities at the national and global levels.

These ranking systems for prioritizing universities use criteria with the same weight for all university groups. Still, according to the field of scientific activity of each university, these criteria have their importance in each university group (comprehensive, industrial, agricultural, etc.) This issue can cause different weights of criteria in each group of universities. Therefore, in this research, an attempt has been made to ensure that the extracted criteria have specific weights for each group, and in the next stage, ranking is done.

In the present study, which was conducted to rank Iran's top universities, the ranking criteria were identified by using background review and world-famous ranking systems. According to the availability of information for Iran's top universities in different academic groups (comprehensive, industrial, medical sciences and art), ۱۶ criteria (in six dimensions of education, research, internationalization, technology and innovation, social services, infrastructure and facilities and economic effectiveness) was extracted for ranking. The fuzzy Delphi method was used to evaluate these criteria. In the next step, using the BWM method, these criteria were weighted in each group of universities, and in the last step, the ranking was done using the Pramet method.

The results of the final ranking based on the Pramet method showed that:

-   In the group of comprehensive universities, Tehran, Beheshti and Ferdowsi Universities of Mashhad

-   In the group of technical universities, Amirkabir, Alam and Sanat and Sharif universities

-   In the group of medical sciences universities, Tehran, Beheshti, and Isfahan Universities of Medical sciences

-   in the group of art universities, Tehran University of Art

They were in the top ranks. The ranking results were evaluated using Waspas and Idas, which are other multi-criteria decision-making techniques. One of the suggestions of this research, considering the low weight of the main index of internationalization compared to the index of education and research, is the establishment of international research centers in universities to communicate with other countries and gain their experience.

Key words: knowledge, universities, ranking systems, internationalization