ARWU adopts six objective indicators to rank world universities, including the number of Highly Cited Researchers representing some of the world’s most influential minds as determined by a citation analysis of Web of Science data from Clarivate Analytics. Close to 1,500 universities are ranked by ARWU every year. This year the list of World Top 500 Candidates is extended to cover all universities ranked in the Top 1,000. Harvard University tops the ranking list for the 16^th year running. Stanford University and the University of Cambridge remain at second and third respectively.

“Hundreds of universities around the world have announced their plans to become global leaders and become known as World-Class Universities,” said Dr. Cheng Ying, Founder & CEO of ShanghaiRanking Consultancy. “As part of our six objective indicators for ARWU, the citation indexes from Clarivate Analytics continue to help us identify those universities with the potential to compete at a global level.”

David Liu, Managing Director, APAC, Clarivate Analytics explained:

“Trusted by more than 20 million users worldwide, our research analytics tools and data power the most prestigious university and academic rankings globally. We highly value our partnership with ShanghaiRanking Consultancy and look forward to continuing our partnership with their teams.”

The United States and China are the two biggest hosts of Top 500 Candidates; the United States has 139 and China has 62 universities listed. The United States has eight universities among the Top 10, 46 among the Top 100 and 139 among the Top 500. There are three universities from China in the Top 100. The United Kingdom has 39 Top 500 universities, and eight of them are also listed in Top 100.

TOP 20 Universities in ARWU 2018

The complete list and detailed methodologies can be found at ShanghaiRanking’s website http://www.ShanghaiRanking.com/.

Amongst this year’s World Top 500 are the following 4 universities from Southeast Asia:

• Rank 85: National University of Singapore
• Rank 96: Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
• Rank 301-400: University of Malaya, Malaysia
• Rank 401-500: Universiti Sains Malaysia (University of Science, Malaysia)

There are 8 universities from Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, which are ranked from 501 to 1000 as ARWU World Top 500 Candidates 2018:

• Rank 501-600: Chulalongkorn University, Thailand
• Rank 501-600: Mahidol University, Thailand
• Rank 501-600: Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (National University of Malaysia)
• Rank 601-700: Universiti Putra Malaysia
• Rank 701-800: Prince of Songkla University, Thailand
• Rank 801:900: Chiang Mai University, Thailand
• Rank 801-900: Singapore University of Technology & Design
• Rank 801-900: Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (University of Technology, Malaysia)

Click here to see the complete list >