The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) is a university ranking conducted by the Institute of Higher Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the Center for World-Class Universities, both located in China. The 500 institutions long list is published every year, although they somehow skipped a year. The current publication is for 2010, and the 2012 ranking is expected shortly.
Interestingly enough, the
ranking only looks at universities that with certain qualifying
factors. To be considered for the list, an institution needs one of
the following:
A Nobel laureate; a fields medallist; highly cited researchers; papers published in Nature or
Science; or a high number of papers indexed by Science Citation
Index-Expanded and Social Science Citation Index.
In practice this
means that most serious institutions are evaluated, so if you are
looking for the best university through the Academic Ranking of World
Universities, this restriction is rather harmless.
In the ranking
methodology, the laureates and Field medal winners also play a big
role.
What they look at:
| Quality of Education
(10%) | Quality of Faculty (40%) | Research Output (40%) | Per Capita
Perfomance (10%) |
What they came up with:
1. Harvard University
2. University of
California, Berkeley
3. Stanford University
4. Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT)
5. University of Cambridge
6. California Institute of
Technology
7. Princeton University
8. Columbia University
9. University of Chicago
10.University of Oxford
The complete list of the
Academic Ranking of World Universities can be found here.
