The annual world ranking of the top schools compiled by a Chinese university has named Harvard as the top school for tenth consecutive year.
The rankings of the world's top 500 universities, released by Shanghai's Jiaotong University today, have previously provoked controversy for placing an emphasis on scientific research, reports The Economic Times.
The top 20 spots are dominated by the US universities, with only three universities being the exceptions- Britain's Cambridge in fifth and Oxford in 10th and University of Tokyo in 20th place.
The list uses six factors, including the number of Nobel prizes and medals won, the number of highly cited researchers on staff and the number of articles by faculty published in Nature and Science magazines.
The top five for 2012 was rounded out by Stanford University in second, Massachusetts Institute of Technology in third and the University of California at Berkeley in fourth.
For Continental Europe, the highest ranked was the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, in 23rd place, followed by two French schools, the University of Paris-Sud 11 at 37 and Pierre and Marie Curie University at 42.
The list was originally conceived to be a yardstick to the performance of Chinese universities, amid efforts by Beijing to create a set of world-class research institutions.
Some European officials are of the opinion that the list neglects the humanities and are thus biased against Europe's universities.
According to a statement released with the rankings, Greater China - including mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong - has no universities in the top 100 but is second for the number of schools in the top 500 with 42 in the list.
Mainland China's top ranked school was prestigious Peking University, which was at 200, closely followed by Jiaotong itself, beating out Tsinghua University, which is often dubbed as China's MIT.
