The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), usually called the Shanghai Rankings, is the oldest global university ranking. It is often counted among the three or four most well-known rankings and has a transparent and stable methodology.
There are six indicators: Nobel and Fields awards to alumni, awards to faculty, highly cited researchers, publications in journals indexed in the Science Citation Index Enhanced and the Social Science Citation Index, articles in Nature and Science, and productivity per capita based on the scores for these metrics per academic staff.
The methodology has not changed since 2004, other than adjustments to take account of procedural changes to the compilation of Clarivate’s lists of highly cited researchers.
At the very top of the new edition things look very familiar. Harvard is in first place, followed by Stanford, MIT, Cambridge, and Berkeley. Fourteen of the top twenty universities are American and three are British. The other three are Paris-Saclay University, Tsinghua University, and ETH Zurich.
Asian universities continue to perform very well. Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Southeast University China, the National University of Singapore, and Nanyang Technological University have all risen a significant number of places. In contrast, In contrast, King Saud University, Saudi Arabia, has fallen by one band, following an earlier and steeper decline by King Abdulaziz University.
There is a marked disparity between the various indicators. The Alumni indicator is headed by Harvard and the top ten is composed entirely of British and American institutions. The Publications indicator, articles in the Science Citation Index Expanded and the Social Science Citation Index in 2025, is led by Zhejiang University, with Shanghai Jiao Tong University second, and Harvard third. Apart from Harvard, there are only three non-Chinese universities in the top twenty for this indictor.
Source:
SHANGHAI RANKING