Academic Ranking of World Universities 2011 is Published. (August 15, 2011)

The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) is conducted at the Center for World-Class Universities of Shanghai Jiao Tong University (CWCU).

Professor Simon Marginson from the University of Melbourne’s Centre for the Study of Higher Education and on the Advisory Board of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University's ARWU told The Conversation's editor, Sunanda Creagh  that the rigorous ranking system was based on standardised published quantitative data such as frequency of publication in journals, citations, and number of Nobel Prize winners. He went on to add that the rise of The University of Melbourne's' elevation from 62 to 60 was a good improvement while the Australian National University’s reputation may suffer for its 11-spot fall from 59 to 70: "What it reflects is the loss of one or more high citation researchers (people in top 250-300 in the field, which makes up 20% of ARWU index) and a decline in the number of published articles in Nature and Science. High citation researchers are hard to replace. ANU was always strongest Australian university in that area but might now be slipping."

Commenting on Australia's listing of 19 universities in the top 500, Professor Marginson said: "On this basis, Australia is on par with other countries with good spread like UK, Switzerland, Germany and Canada, and has a better spread of capacity relative to national size than does the USA. Australia, however, lacks top 50 universities, whereas Canada has two – Toronto at 26 and British Columbia at 37 – and the UK has four. We need to build stronger globally potent research concentrations, without taking resources away from broad capacity. Canada has a better policy approach as it achieves both objectives."

However, Professor Marginson concluded: "I don’t think any of the composite rankings that combine heterogeneous indicators of research outcomes, funding, staffing and student numbers into one league table are satisfactory. None measure teaching and learning quality. In particular, mixing reputation measures and material measures – mixing objective and subjective qualities – is conceptually flawed."

We would point out that ARWU makes it clear that its rankings are designed to compare universities on their contributions to research.

Below we reproduce several of their principle tables.

Click here to get full list of top 500 overall

Click here to get access to all sub-tables and their full 100 listings

Tabulations for: USA, UK, Germany, Canada, France, Australia, Japan, Switzerland, Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Israel, Norway, Finland, Russia and China can be accessed from the bottom of the ARWU home page.