Johns Hopkins climbs in annual Shanghai Ranking of top world universities

The 2015 Academic Ranking of World Universities – compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and issued August 15 – uses several criteria to measure excellence.

World’s top universities are leading American institutions such as Harvard, Stanford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of California, Berkeley. Tel Aviv University was ranked 20th in this field, but did not place in the overall top 100.

On the global rank list, Utrecht University now ranks number 56 in the world falling back a few places from last year followed by the University of Groningen at spot 75 and then Leiden University at 82.

On the other hand, China Medical University, which previously ranked between 400th and 500th, ascended to the top 400 category, representing the biggest improvement among the nation’s universities that made the list.

UCLA placed second among public universities nationally and 12th among all universities globally in a prestigious worldwide ranking.

According to annual Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) for 2015, released by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is Israel’s leading academic institution, ranked 67, up from 70 previous year. The Center of World-Class Universities under Jiaotong University surveys 1,200 universities and picks the top 500 every year.

More specifically, these include Nobel Prize and Fields Medal winners among faculty and alumni weighted by decade received, Thomson Reuters’ Highly Cited Researchers, the number of papers in Nature and Science published between 2009 and 2013, and the number of papers indexed in Science Citation and Social Science Citation in 2013.The weighted scores of these indicators are divided by the FTE of academic staff to obtain the per capita performance rating.

University of Tokyo was 21st and Kyoto University, both Japanese schools, were on the 26 places, like previous year.

This would require the nation’s higher education facilities to utilize their resources more efficiently, or their rankings could continue to decline, Huang said.