The United Arab Emirates University has made a qualitative ‎leap in the academic research during 2021, which is a year ‎full of many research achievements and scientific ‎innovations. The academic research is a fundamental pillar ‎through which the university seeks to provide the capabilities ‎to achieve the university's vision of being a research-intensive ‎university.‎

The UAEU researchers were able to enhance the role of the ‎university as a center of expertise and knowledge through the ‎results of research supervised by the various research teams ‎from various colleges and research centers, which were ‎published in the most prestigious international journals. The ‎UAEU researchers published 1934 research papers in 2021 in ‎those journals, compared to 1,538 papers in 2020, which is ‎an increase of 25.7%. The College of Science researchers ‎published 491 research papers according to Scopus database ‎in 2021, while the College of Engineering researchers ‎published 369 and the College of Medicine and Health ‎Sciences 373 research papers in 2021.‎

The university pays great attention to the quality of education ‎outcomes by encouraging researchers to publish in the top ‎‎25% of international journals according to Scopus database. ‎The data shows that the quality of research production is ‎constantly increasing, as the percentage of high-quality ‎production in research‏ ‏papers excluding papers that published ‎in conference volumes and book chapters increased from ‎‎53.6% in 2020 to 60.8% in 2021, while research publication ‎increased in the top 10% of international journals according to ‎Scopus data from 23.8% in 2020 to 25.3% in 2021.‎

This increase in academic research production was positively ‎reflected on the average citation per paper. The citation rate ‎for each research paper in the last five years increased from ‎‎8.39 in 2020 to 9.3 in 2021, and this confirms the remarkable ‎improvement in the quality of research outputs.‎

Prof. Ahmed Ali Murad, Associate Provost for Research at ‎UAEU, said that the university has provided all means to ‎support academic research from state of the art laboratories ‎that help in building a research environment that supports ‎innovation and enables researchers to provide practical ‎solutions to societal challenges related to national strategic ‎priorities. The university also provided various opportunities ‎for funding research projects based on scientific competition ‎to ensure the achievement of promising and high quality ‎research outputs. The office of the Associate Provost for ‎Research is dedicated to support student research ideas in ‎order to contribute to enhancing the academic research skills ‎of the university student as a necessary future skill required ‎for the next fifty years.‎