In 2023, the Shanghai Ranking System published its ranking in the field of sports sciences, and the University of Guilan with a global rank of 201-300 along with Islamic Azad University, University of Tehran, and Isfahan University were among 460 sports universities, and their 523 sports units.

Two criteria in this ranking include universities that are either sports science universities or have a sports-related unit or units, and secondly, having a certain number of articles in the Web of Science database in the last 5 years to indicate their continuous research activity.

In the next stage, the selected universities are ranked and introduced based on 5 indicators: the number of articles indexed in Web of Science, total citations, citations per article, articles published in the top 25% of journals, and the percentage of international joint articles.