Simon Fraser University has moved up the ranks since last year among the world’s top universities under 50 years old, according to the 2013 Times Higher Education 100 Rankings.

SFU, which opened in 1965, is now ranked No. 26 among 100 worldwide universities under 50, four notches higher than in 2012 when it ranked No. 30.

The U.K.-based rankings used 13 performance indicators to examine the 100 universities’ future potential and current excellence.

The rankings placed less influence on reputation this year and more on research volume and income, citations (research influence) and teaching (the learning environment).

"SFU’s growing success in an increasingly competitive global research environment is the result of a concerted university-wide research strategy that financially and logistically supports both individual and partnership initiatives,” says Mario Pinto, SFU’s vice-president of research.

“We now have a well-established reputation for punching far above our weight in the national and global research arenas in both fundamental and applied research.

“And that in turn helps us attract some of the best and the brightest to SFU to study and do research.”

SFU ranked third among Canadian universities under 50 this year, behind the universities of Victoria and Calgary.

The leader worldwide was Korea’s Pohang University of Science and Technology, followed by the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale of Lausanne, Switzerland and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

The top U.S. school was the University of California, Irvine, in fifth place behind the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.