Education News: Harvard University Claims Top Spot In Chinese Academic Ranking of World Universities

Harvard University has done it again. The prestigious university has secured the top spot in ShanghaiRanking's Academic Ranking of World Universities for this year, a position it has held for 14 straight years since ShanghaiRanking Consultancy started to rank universities all over the world way back in 2003.

According to ShanghaiRanking, Stanford University maintained its standing in the second spot from last year. Meanwhile, University of California - Berkeley and University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom moved up a spot each to take the third and fourth places respectively. Rounding up the top five was Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which fell two places short of its ranking last year.

The rankings are based on six criteria. These are the number of university alumni and staff who won Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, the number of Highly Cited Researchers in a university, the number of university articles published in journals of Nature and Science, the number of university articles indexed in Science Citation Index - Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index and per capita performance.

With eight universities on the list, the United States dominated the top universities based on the Chinese rankings, Times Higher Education reported. Princeton University, California Institute of Technology, were at 6^th and 8^th places while Columbia University and the University of Chicago were 9^th and 10^th. Another United Kingdom university completed the Top 10, with the University of Oxford placing 7^th.

An AFP report posted in Yahoo said that with a rise of three places, the University of Oxford had the biggest jump in rankings among the Top 20 as the rankings are "consistently largely static at its top levels." The report said that this year saw the entry of universities from mainland China in the Top 100, with Tsinghua University taking the 58^th spot and Peking University coming in as 71^st.