The University of Malta placed fifth in a new ranking for universities and institutions on their publishing activity within the technical field of games.

Published by American University Assistant Professor Mark J. Nelson, the ranking evaluates the top 100 institutions based on their publishing activity over the past decade dedicated to technical aspects of games and interactive media.

This includes research in artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction and graphics, the University of Malta (UM) wrote in a press statement on Wednesday.

“I am very happy and proud of the work by my colleagues and our students that has led to this outstanding achievement," the UM’s Institute of Digital Games Professor Georgios N. Yannakakis said on the achievement.

This is not the first time the university has made it onto the list. In 2018, it made its first appearance at ninth place, gaining four places to take fifth this year.

To create the rankings, credit for papers was assigned to each publication’s author and their current university while multi-author publication credits were split fractionally.

With 53.7 published papers, UM published more than Google, Nvidia, Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook) and Microsoft, each one a giant in the tech gaming industry.

Four universities outscored Malta with the top spot taken by the University of California Santa Cruz which published 116.4 papers over the past 10 years. Following it were the University of Alberta (87.6), Queen Mary University of London (73.7) and Northeastern University (69.6).

“We managed to climb to the 5th position of this list surpassing game tech giants and prestigious universities in North America and Europe,” Yannakakis said.

Recognising the effort of students and staff to raise the bar to a world-class standard, Yannakakis said that the ranking results from years of hard work and commitment to excellent research.

“The Institute of Digital Games, once more, demonstrated that its strong focus on excellence and multidisciplinary can place Malta centrally on the world research map.”