Trinity College Dublin has been ranked among the top 50 universities in Europe, according to a new ranking. 

The QS World University Rankings has published its first-ever ranking solely focusing on European universities, ranking all 688 colleges in Europe. 

Trinity College was the highest-ranked Irish university, placing 31st in the newly-published list. 

In the Northern Europe subsection of the new ranking, Trinity cracked the top 20, landing at 19th out of 166 universities. 

Described as Ireland's leading university, Trinity was also ranked number 1 in Ireland and 81st in the world in the QS World University Rankings 2024.

A total of eight Irish universities were included in the newly-published QS World University Rankings: Europe 2024 which included 688 universities.

While Trinity was ranked 31st, University College Dublin came in at 71st, University of Galway was ranked 98th, University College Cork was 109th, Dublin City University and University of Limerick tied at 152nd, Technological University Dublin ranked 286th, and Maynooth University landed at 311th. 

Meanwhile, Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland ranked 38th on the listing.

The QS World University Rankings: Europe 2024 is QS Top Universities' first-ever ranking focused exclusively on European universities. The University of Oxford claimed first place, closely followed by ETH Zurich. Seven of the top 10 universities in Europe are based in the UK.

The rankings take a number of different criteria into account, with a university's academic reputation accounting for 30% of its final ranking. 

The ranking also factors in a university's employer reputation and its international research network. 

A university's citation per paper, which gauges the impact of its research, and paper per faculty, which evaluates the productivity of researchers at a university, also contributed to the final score. 

Also contributing to a university's score is its employment outcomes, faculty-student ratio, international student diversity, international faculty ratio, inbound exchange student ratio, and outbound exchange student ratio.