Summer Ranking: A New World University League Table

Just out, as a special summer holiday treat, is the latest ARWU league table.

Anyway, as in previous years there really is very little to get too stressed about as this is a league table where not much changes from year to year. The full rankings have been published and are now available at the ARWU website.

As in many previous years there are really very few surprises and almost no movement in the top 20 with Harvard retaining the number 1 spot yet again and everyone else just about unchanged too. Overall there is very little movement in top 20. The press release adds a little more colour to Harvard’s 14th glorious year:

Harvard University remains the number one in the world for the 14th year. Berkeley raise from the 4th to the 3rd. Oxford soars from the 10th place to the 7th. ETH Zurich (19th) takes first place in Continental Europe, and University of Copenhagen (31st) in Denmark overtakes Pierre & Marie Curie (39th) in France as the second best university in this area. In Asia, University of Tokyo is back to Top 20 but Kyoto University drop from 26th to 32nd. University of Melbourne (40th) tops other universities in Oceania, followed by University of Queensland (55th).

There are, like, totally nine new entrants into the top 100 and, most significantly, places for China:

There are totally 9 universities breaking into the Top 100 list in 2016, among which Tsinghua University, Peking University, Monash University, National University of Singapore, Mayo Medical School and the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center make their first appearance in the Top 100. This is also the first time for China and Singapore to have Top 100 universities in the world.

In total, 27 universities have made it into the Top 500 list for the first time.

Here is the world top 20:

This ranking doesn’t use a huge number of criteria, only six:

ARWU adopts six objective indicators to rank world universities, including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, the number of Highly Cited Researchers, the number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science, the number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index – Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, and per capita performance. More than 1200 universities are actually ranked by ARWU every year and the best 500 universities are published.

There is much more detail on the methodology here for those interested in the minutiae.

There is very little movement too in the UK positions with the top 8 in exactly the same order within the world 100, although Warwick drops down to the 16-21 range.