Cambridge ranked UK’s top university by Shanghai Rankings

Cambridge was ranked third overall in the world, behind Harvard and Stanford

Cambridge achieved a score of 70.6 out of 100, based on factors such as the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel PrizesLucas Maddalena

by Caitlin Farrell

This article is 4 years old

Monday August 23 2021, 4:37pm

The University of Cambridge has been ranked the UK’s top university by Shanghai Ranking Consultancy, an independent educational consultancy which annually publishes an Academic Ranking of World Universities.

Cambridge was ranked third in the world with a score of 70.6 out of 100 based on what Shanghai Rankings describes as “six objective indicators” including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes, rates of publication by academics, and the number of “highly cited researchers”.

Every year over 1,800 universities are surveyed by Shanghai Ranking Consultancy and the rankings of the best 1,000 are published.

The two top universities were Harvard and Stanford, both in the United States, with scores of 100 and 75.9 respectively.

Cambridge falls to 6th place in Times Higher Education World University Rankings

The next two highest ranked UK universities were Oxford, in seventh place with a score of 59.2, and University College London, in seventeenth place with a score of 47.3.

The rankings consider any university in the world with “Nobel Laureates, Fields Medalists, Highly Cited Researchers, or papers published in Nature or Science”, as well as those with high rates of papers cited.

The consultancy examines the data “for any significant distorting effect”.

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