Harvard Retains Top Spot in 2016 Shanghai Ranking

Harvard University today retains the top spot in the 2016 edition of the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) – widely known as the Shanghai Ranking – a position it has now occupied for 14 years. Stanford University holds onto second place, while the University of California, Berkeley climbs one position to third. While there is some re-shuffling within the top 10, no universities break into or drop out of this group, in which the United States’ clean sweep is interrupted only by the UK’s Oxbridge institutions.

The top tier of the ARWU ranking is strongly dominated by US universities – even more so than the QS World University Rankings® or the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings. While only two UK universities feature in the Shanghai Ranking’s top 10, the latest edition of the QS ranking features four UK entries at this level, and THE three.

Both the QS and THE rankings also feature Switzerland’s ETH Zurich within their top 10s. While the prestigious Swiss institution remains continental Europe’s leading entry in the Shanghai Ranking, it does not appear until 19^th.

The only other non-US and -UK institution to feature in the Shanghai Ranking’s top 20 is Japan’s University of Tokyo (Todai), which climbs one position this year to rank 20^th. This time the result is much higher than in the other rankings; Todai comes 39^th in the latest QS ranking, and 43^rd in THE.

Canada’s leading representative in the ARWU, the University of Toronto, falls two places this year to rank 27^th – higher than its position in the QS table, but lower than its place in the THE list. France’s leader in the Shanghai Ranking, Pierre and Marie Curie University - Paris 6, drops three positions to 39^th, but remains much higher here than in either of the other tables.

Nearby in the table, Denmark’s University of Copenhagen strengthens its position, climbing five places to 30^th. Australia’s leading entrant, the University of Melbourne, will also be celebrating, having climbed four positions to 40^th - similar to its QS position, though lower than it ranks in THE. Meanwhile Sweden’s Karolinska Institute likewise gains four positions, finishing at 44^th. 

About the Shanghai Ranking

Published annually since 2003, the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), or Shanghai Ranking, publishes the world’s top 500 universities based on six indicators. These include the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, number of highly cited researchers, number of articles published in Nature and Science, number of articles indexed in the Science Citation Index and Social Science Citation Index, and per capita academic performance of an institution. While there are some similarities with the methodologies used to create the QS World University Rankings® and the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, all three apply a different set of indicators and weightings – resulting in lists that while largely correlated, often differ in both individual ranking positions and broader national trends.