2023 ShanghaiRanking ARWU Released! 34 Australian Universities Make the List, 6 in the Global Top 100 — Melbourne Leads Again!

The ShanghaiRanking’s Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) was first published in 2003 by the Center for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. It was the world’s first comprehensive global ranking of universities.

Alongside Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE), the QS World University Rankings and the U.S. News Best Global Universities Rankings, ARWU is one of the four most authoritative university rankings in the world.

Ranking Methodology

The Academic Ranking of World Universities considers every institution that has a faculty member or alumnus who has won a Nobel Prize or a Fields Medal; every institution with Highly Cited Researchers; every institution that has published papers as the corresponding-author affiliation in Nature or Science over the past 10 years; and the institutions in each country with a substantial number of papers indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). More than 2,500 universities are actually assessed in the ranking, and the world’s top 1,000 are published.

ARWU ranks the academic performance of world universities against six indicators: the weighted number of alumni who have won a Nobel Prize or Fields Medal (“Alumni”); the weighted number of staff who have won a Nobel Prize in the sciences or a Fields Medal (“Award”); the number of Highly Cited Researchers across subject categories (“HiCi”); the weighted number of papers published in Nature and Science (“N&S”); the number of papers indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) (“PUB”); and the per-capita performance of the institution across the five indicators above (“PCP”).

For each of the six indicators — Alumni, Award, Highly Cited Researchers, N&S papers, indexed papers and per-capita performance — the highest-scoring institution is assigned 100, and other institutions are scored as a percentage of that top value. Where the data for any indicator shows a marked anomaly, standard statistical methods are applied to adjust it. Scores across the six indicators are then weighted: the institution with the highest total is assigned 100, and all others are scored as a percentage of that top value.

In this year’s ranking, Harvard University remains in top spot, holding first place globally for the 21st consecutive year. Stanford University sits just behind Harvard, again ranked second worldwide, with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology placed third.

Eight of the top 10 universities are in the United States. The top 10 are as follows: