About UNIREAL
UNIREAL is an independent guide for students choosing a university abroad, with a focus on studying in the EU and the Schengen area. This page explains where every number on the site comes from, how the UNIREAL Score is calculated and what our data cannot tell you.
What UNIREAL covers
4,915 university profiles worldwide, guides to 11 study destinations, rankings, field-of-study pages, scholarships and an admission-deadline calendar — every page in English, Romanian and Persian.
Where the data comes from
We combine open datasets with research from each university's own website. The Data sources line on every profile shows which of them were used.
- Hipolabs University Domains ↗
University names, countries, official websites and email domains (MIT licence). The email domains power the Verified badge.
- ROR — Research Organization Registry ↗
Persistent identifiers, founding year and location of research organisations (CC0).
- OpenAlex ↗
Number of publications (the research part of the score), city, coordinates and logos (CC0).
- Wikidata ↗
Names in Persian and Romanian, logos, founding year and student numbers (CC0).
- U.S. College Scorecard ↗
Tuition, admission rate and size of U.S. institutions (U.S. Department of Education, public domain).
- Official university websites
Descriptions, programs, tuition, admission periods and deadlines, researched with AI-assisted web search that prefers each university's own admissions pages. Every profile shows the date it was last updated.
How the UNIREAL Score works
The UNIREAL Score is a single 0–100 number for comparing universities' research strength and international standing. It is calculated by formula from the data above; nobody adjusts it by hand.
| Component | Weight | How it is scaled to 0–100 |
|---|---|---|
| International ranking | 30% | 100 − 25 × log₁₀(rank): rank 1 → 100, 10 → 75, 100 → 50, 1,000 → 25 |
| Research activity | 35% | 16.6 × log₁₀(publications + 1), capped at 100: 1,000 publications → 50, 100,000 → 83 |
| Awards | 15% | Notable awards, log-scaled: 200 or more → 100 |
| Competition medals | 10% | Medals in world student competitions, log-scaled: 100 or more → 100 |
| Elite students | 10% | Medal-winning and elite students, log-scaled: 500 or more → 100 |
Only the components we have data for are used, and their weights are re-scaled to add up to 100%, so missing data never lowers a score.
Today, ranking, award, medal and elite-student data exist for a small curated set of universities only. For most universities the score therefore reflects research activity alone — how much the university publishes — which favours large research universities over teaching-focused ones.
The score does not measure teaching quality, student satisfaction, graduate employment or how hard it is to get in.
How profiles stay up to date
A profile's description, programs, tuition and admission dates are researched the first time they are needed and refreshed once they are more than 60 days old. Deadlines are shown only while they are still ahead. Profiles that have not been researched yet carry only basic facts and are kept out of search engines until they are.
Reviews and questions
Anyone with an account can write a review or ask a question. When the email address someone signed up with belongs to the university's own domain, their posts carry a Verified badge. Some reviews are quoted from public sources such as Reddit, Niche or Google; those are labelled with their source and link to the original.
What the data cannot tell you
Fees and deadlines change every year and often differ by program and by citizenship — students from outside the EU usually pay more. Treat the figures here as a starting point and confirm them on the university's official website before you apply.
Automated research can be wrong. If you spot a mistake, tell us and we will correct it.
Contact and corrections
Corrections, questions or partnership requests: