China has 23 universities in the top 500 of the 2011 Academic Ranking of World Universities compiled by the Shanghai Jiatong University in China.
Tsinghua University, The National Taiwan University and Chinese University of Hong Kong were the top three Chinese universities, and were listed in the top 200 worldwide.
Harvard University topped the list for the ninth consecutive year, with US universities dominating the top 10 and accounting for nearly half the top 100.
Tsinghua University in Beijing is the top Chinese university and is included in the “151-200” bracket of the listing, widely known as the Shanghai Ranking,
Peking University, Fudan University, Nanjing University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, University of Science and Technology of China and Zhejiang University all made the top 300.
“We didn’t precisely rank the universities out of the top 100 because of their minor gap between each other,” Cheng Ying, executive director of the Center for World-Class Universities, told the Shanghai Daily newspaper.
More than 1,000 universities are evaluated every year and the best 500 are published online.
The ranking evaluates performance via six indicators: the number of staff and alumni winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals; number of highly cited researchers selected by Thomson Scientific; number of articles published in the journals Nature and Science; number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index – Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index; and per capita performance based on the size of an institution.