Times Higher Education World University Rankings

The annual Times Higher Education World University Rankings for 2014–2015 have been published. The top three universities have held their position from last year: Caltech came in first, followed by Harvard and Oxford.

Unsurprisingly, the top spots are dominated by US and UK universities. The only exceptions in the top 20 are ETH Zürich, Switzerland, (13th place) and the University of Toronto, Canada (rank 20).

Top 20 Universities


Rank	Institution	Country	Score

1	California Institute of Technology (Caltech)	USA	94.3
2	Harvard University	USA	93.3
3	University of Oxford	UK	93.2
4	Stanford University	USA	92.9
5	University of Cambridge	UK	92.0

6	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)	USA	91.9
7	Princeton University	USA	90.9
8	University of California, Berkeley	USA	89.5
9	Imperial College London	UK	87.5
9	Yale University	USA	87.5

11	University of Chicago	USA	87.1
12	University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)	USA	85.5
13	ETH Zürich	Switzerland	84.6
14	Columbia University	USA	84.4
15	Johns Hopkins University	USA	83.0

16	University of Pennsylvania	USA	81.0
17	University of Michigan	USA	80.9
18	Duke University	USA	79.9
19	Cornell University	USA	79.4
20	University of Toronto	Canada	79.3

Top 20 Universities in the Physical Sciences


Rank	Institution	Country	Score

1	Princeton University	USA	93.1
2	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)	USA	92.6
3	Harvard University	USA	92.3
4	California Institute of Technology (Caltech)	USA	92.0
4	Stanford University	USA	92.0

6	University of Cambridge	UK	90.4
7	University of Oxford	UK	88.6
8	University of Chicago	USA	87.0
9	University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)	USA	86.8
10	University of California, Berkeley	USA	86.4

11	ETH Zürich	Switzerland	85.2
12	Imperial College London	UK	85.1
13	Yale University	USA	84.7
14	Columbia University	USA	82.8
15	Cornell University	USA	81.1

16	Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München	Germany	76.8
17	University of Washington	USA	76.2
18	The University of Tokyo	Japan	75.6
19	University of Toronto	Canada	75.3
20	École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne	Switzerland	73.3

Physical Sciences subjects used to create this ranking:

Astronomy & Astrophysics
Chemistry
Crystallography
Earth Sciences
Mathematics & Statistics
Meteorology & Atmospheric Sciences
Nanotechnology
Physics
Polymer Science
Physical Sciences – Other topics

Top 10 Countries


Country	Number of institutions in the top 200

USA	74
UK	29
Germany	12
Netherlands	11
Australia	8
Canada	8
France	7
Switzerland	7
Japan	5
Sweden	5

Methodology

The Times Higher Education ranking uses 13 performance indicators, grouped into five areas:

Teaching: the learning environment (30 % of the overall ranking score)
Research: volume, income and reputation (30 %)
Citations: research influence (30 %)
Industry income: innovation (2.5 %)
International outlook: staff, students and research (7.5 %).

Institutions provide and sign off their institutional data for use in the rankings. Data concerning publications and citations is supplied by Thomson Reuters.

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