The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) is first published in June 2003 by the Center for World-Class Universities and the Institute of Higher Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, and then updated on an annual basis. ARWU uses six objective indicators to rank world universities, including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, number of highly cited researchers selected by Thomson Scientific, number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science, number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index - Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, and per capita performance with respect to the size of an institution. More than 1000 universities are actually ranked by ARWU every year and the best 500 are published on the web.
Although the initial purpose of ARWU was to find the global standing of Chinese top universities, it has attracted a great deal of attention from universities, governments and public media worldwide. A survey on higher education published by The Economist in 2005 commented ARWU as "the most widely used annual ranking of the world's research universities"1. Burton Bollag, a reporter at Chronicle of Higher Education wrote that ARWU "is considered the most influential international ranking"2.
One of the factors for the significant influence of ARWU is that its methodology is globally sound and transparent. The EU Research Headlines reported the ARWU work on 31st December 2003: "The universities were carefully evaluated using several indicators of research performance."3 Chancellor of Oxford University, Chris Patten, said "the methodology looks fairly solid ... it looks like a pretty good stab at a fair comparison."4 Professor Simon Margison of University of Melbourne commented that one of the strengths of "the academically rigorous and globally inclusive Jiao Tong approach" is "constantly tuning its rankings and invites open collaboration in that"5.
http://www.arwu.org/
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