According to the Vice-Chancellor of Research and Technology of the University of Guilan, the report by the Clarivate Analytics Institute of the world's top citation institutions in the Basic Science Indicators (ESI) database indicates that the University of Guilan has managed to be among the 41 comprehensive universities of the country in this list and has also been able to be ranked among the world's leading institutions in the engineering, chemistry, material science, plant, and animal science fields.

 Every two months, Clarivate Analytics first divides the publications indexed in its database into 22 subject areas and then divides the universities and research institutes in each area according to the number of citations received in the last 10 years (2012-2020) to select the best institutions in the world. It sorts in descending order (from the most to the least) and selects the top 1% of institutions with the most references. The number of universities and research institutes in all subject areas is 8557, of which 115 Iranian universities and research institutes are seen on this list.