Cruel summer - the all new ARWU world ranking

Your ideal holiday reading is here. Freshly minted as a special summer holiday treat, we have the very latest ARWU league table. As in previous editions there really is very little to get you out of your sun lounger as this is a league table where things remain pretty stable from year to year. The full rankings are now available at the ARWU website.

There are really very few surprises here therefore and yet again almost no movement in the top 20 with Harvard retaining the number 1 spot and everyone else just about unchanged too. There is one new entry to the top 20 and the biggest jump inside the 20 is the University of Washington which climbs two places to 13. Johns Hopkins & Berkeley both drop 2. The press release adds a little more background to Harvard’s 15th table-topping year:

Harvard University remains the number one in the world for the 15^th year. Stanford continues to be the second top university. The University of Cambridge overtakes MIT and Berkeley and raises to the third best university in the world. Washington University in St. Louis enters the top 20 for the first time. ETH Zurich (19^th) in Switzerland continues to be the top ranked university in Continental Europe this year, followed by University of Copenhagen (30^th) in Denmark and Pierre and Marie Curie University (40^th) in France. Tokyo university is ranked 24^th and is still the highest ranked university in Asia. Tsinghua University (48^th) enters the top 50 for the first time and becomes the third top ranked Asian universities behind Kyoto University (35^th). University of Melbourne (39^th) tops other universities in Oceania.

Here is the world top 20:

2017	2016	Institution	Country
1	1	Harvard University	USA
2	2	Stanford University	USA
3	4	University of Cambridge	UK
4	5	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)	USA
5	3	University of California, Berkeley	USA
6	6	Princeton University	USA
7	7	University of Oxford	UK
8	9	Columbia University	USA
9	8	California Institute of Technology	USA
10	10	University of Chicago	USA
11	11	Yale University	USA
12	12	University of California, Los Angeles	USA
13	15	University of Washington	USA
14	13	Cornell University	USA
15	14	University of California, San Diego	USA
16	17	University College London	UK
17	18	University of Pennsylvania	USA
18	16	John Hopkins University	USA
19	19	Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich	Switzerland
20	23	Washington University in St Louis	USA

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

Universities are ranked by several indicators of academic or research performance, including alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, highly cited researchers, papers published in Nature and Science, papers indexed in major citation indices, and the per capita academic performance of an institution. For each indicator, the highest scoring institution is assigned a score of 100, and other institutions are calculated as a percentage of the top score. The distribution of data for each indicator is examined for any significant distorting effect; standard statistical techniques are used to adjust the indicator if necessary.

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

There has also been very little movement in the UK positions but Cambridge has nudged further ahead and Cardiff has entered the top 100.

Country Rank	Institution	World Rank
1	University of Cambridge	3
2	University of Oxford	7
3	University College London	16
4	Imperial College London	27
5	The University of Edinburgh	32
6	The University of Manchester	38
7	King's College London	46
8	University of Bristol	61
9	Cardiff University	99
10--17	The University of Glasgow	101--150
10--17	The University of Sheffield	101--150
10--17	University of Birmingham	101--150
10--17	University of Leeds	101--150
10--17	University of Liverpool	101--150
10--17	University of Nottingham	101--150
10--17	University of Southampton	101--150
10--17	University of Warwick	101--150
18--20	London School of Economics and Political Science	151--200
18--20	Queen Mary University of London	151--200
18--20	University of Exeter	151--200