News & Views item - December  2004

Not content to assign an overall ranking to for the world's universities (see News and Views November 5, 2004) The Times Higher Education Supplement interrogated 1300 world academics in 88 countries to get their opinions of the world's best universities as regards the institutions' science.

    According to what might be considered to be peer assessment, Cambridge led the pack by a fair margin with Oxford taking silver and Harvard bronze. Tokyo University came in 7^th while Imperial College ranked 10^th and the University of Beijing 11^th. In between the usual US players filled the spots.

Six of Australia's Group of Eight Universities are included in the World's 100 best science universities.

The Times education editor, Tony Halpin summed up the findings:

The THES league table showed that Britain has 10 universities in the top 100, as does Germany, although its highest-placed institution, Heidelberg, was only 21st. The top European university outside Britain was the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, in 13th place. France also had three institutions in the top 20.

The table indicates the rising importance of Asia, with seven Chinese and six Japanese universities in the top 100, as well as two from South Korea and one each from Taiwan and Singapore. Australia also fares well, with six universities in the list, one more than France.

Harvard leads the way, however, on the amount of scientific research produced by academics that is cited in other papers., Work by its staff received more than 20 references per paper, compared with a little more than 12 for Cambridge and Oxford.

Three American universities dominated a similar ranking of the top 100 centres for engineering and information technology.