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The league table, compiled by the Chinese university and officially known as the Academic Ranking of World Universities, ranks the top ten as: Harvard University; Stanford University; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Cambridge; the California Institute of Technology; Princeton University; Columbia University; the University of Chicago; and the University of Oxford.

The US remains dominant in the rankings, which are based on research capacity, with 17 of the top 20 universities and 53 of the top 100.

Harvard came top in four out of five ¡°broad¡± subject fields: natural sciences and mathematics; life and agriculture sciences; clinical medicine and pharmacy; and social sciences. MIT was ranked best for engineering/technology and computer sciences. Harvard was also top in three narrower subject fields: physics; chemistry; and economics/business. Princeton was judged best for mathematics, while Stanford came top for computer science.

The UK has seen a slight drop in its position at the top end of the table with two institutions in the top 20 and nine in the top 100, meaning it has one fewer university in each band compared with last year.

University College London has dropped one place to 21st, while the University of Sheffield has dropped out of the top 100.

The UK universities in the top 100 are the University of Cambridge (5), the University of Oxford (10), University College London (21), Imperial College London (24), the University of Manchester (40), the University of Edinburgh (51), King¡¯s College London (68), the University of Bristol (70) and the University of Nottingham (86).

There are 38 UK universities in the top 500, more than any other country except the US (150) and China (42). However, China does not have any universities in the top 100.

The Israeli university system now has three institutions in the top 100, two more than in 2011. Australia increased its tally to five, overtaking Germany and Japan.

The rankings use six mainly research-based measures to score institutions including: alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals; highly-cited researchers according to Thomson Reuters; articles published in Nature and Science; articles indexed in Thomson Reuters¡¯ Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index; and per capita performance based on the size of an institution.

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings will be published in the autumn.

david.matthews@tsleducation.com