August 19, 2005

UCSD Ranked 13th Among World Universities
In Shanghai University Academic Rankings

By Dolores Davies

An academic ranking of world universities published on the web Aug. 12 by the Institute of Higher Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, lists the University of California, San Diego as 13th among 1,000 international institutions ranked.

This latest academic ranking follows rankings announced earlier this week by Newsweek/Kaplan in which UCSD was named the “hottest university for science,” and an annual survey just issued by US News & World Report which rated UCSD as the 7th best public university in the nation.

N.C. Liu and Y. Cheng, authors of the worldwide study, noted that institutions are ranked according to their academic or research performance. “Ranking indicators include the alumni and staff winning major international awards, highly cited researchers in major research fields, articles published in selected top journals, articles indexed by major citation indexes, and performance per capita, “ the authors said. “We chose to rank research universities in the world by their academic or research performance based on internationally comparable dates that everyone could check. No subjective measures were taken.”

A total 2,000 international institutions were scanned, and 1,000 ranked. Of the top 500, the U.S. was in a dominant position, with 85 percent of the top 20 institutions, followed by the United Kingdom.

The top 20 of the top 1,000 in the academic ranking, in order, were Harvard, Cambridge, Stanford, UC Berkeley, MIT, Cal Tech, Columbia, Princeton, University of Chicago, Oxford, Yale, Cornell, UCSD, UCLA, University of Pennsylvania, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Washington, UC San Francisco, Johns Hopkins, and Tokyo University.

Media Contact: Dolores Davies, (858) 534-5994