Annual Rankings of the World's Universities Released

The 2015 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) has been released and while Canada didn’t crack the top of the list, they still fared well.

The top university in Canada according to the Center for World-Class Universities is the University of Toronto. This school was followed by the University of British Columbia and McGill University. While Toronto is the top school in Canada, it ranked 25^th in the world rankings. UBC had a world ranking of 40 and McGill had a world rank of 64 out of 500. Starting from 2003, ARWU has been presenting the world Top 500 universities annually based on transparent methodology and third-party data.

The top 25 universities in the world according to ARWU (Photo Credit: ARWU)

Harvard University remains the number one school in the world for the 13^th year. The other top 10 universities are Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Cambridge, Princeton, Caltech, Columbia, Chicago, and Oxford. In Continental Europe, ETH Zurich (20^th) in Switzerland takes first place, and University of Copenhagen (35^th) in Denmark overtakes Pierre & Marie Curie (36^th) in France as the second best university in this region. University of Tokyo (21^st) and Kyoto University (26^th) keep their leading positions in Asia. University of Melbourne (44^th) tops other universities in Oceania.

University of Warwick (92^nd) in UK enters the Top 100 list for the first time. There are a total of 11 universities breaking into the Top 500 list in 2015, including Queensland University of Technology in Australia and Sharif University of Technology in Iran making their first appearances.

ARWU considers every university that has any Nobel Laureates, Fields Medalists, Highly Cited Researchers, or papers published in Nature or Science. In addition, universities with significant amount of papers indexed by Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCIE) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) are also included.

The full ranking of Canadian universities (Photo Credit: ARWU)

Universities are ranked by several indicators of academic or research performance, including alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, highly cited researchers, papers published in Nature and Science, papers indexed in major citation indices, and the per capita academic performance of an institution. For each indicator, the highest scoring institution is assigned a score of 100, and other institutions are calculated as a percentage of the top score.

The distribution of data for each indicator is examined for any significant distorting effect; standard statistical techniques are used to adjust the indicator if necessary. Scores for each indicator are weighted to arrive at a final overall score for an institution.

The highest scoring institution is assigned a score of 100, and other institutions are calculated as a percentage of the top score. An institution's rank reflects the number of institutions that sit above it.