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The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2018 list the top 1,000 universities in the world, making it our biggest international league table to date.

It is the only global university performance table to judge research-intensive universities across all of their core missions: teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook. We use 13 carefully calibrated performance indicators to provide the most comprehensive and balanced comparisons, trusted by students, academics, university leaders, industry and governments.

The calculation of the rankings for 2018 has been subject to independent audit by professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), making these the only global university rankings to be subjected to full, independent scrutiny of this nature.

This year, we have made a slight improvement to how we handle our papers per academic staff calculation, and expanded the number of broad subject areas that we use. The top 1,000 represents no more than 5 per cent of the 20,000 higher education institutions in the world.

View the World University Rankings 2018 methodology

This year¡¯s list of the best universities in the world is led by two UK universities for the first time. The University of Oxford has held on to the number one spot for the second year in a row, while the University of Cambridge has jumped from fourth to second place.

Overall, European institutions occupy half of the top 200 places, with the Netherlands and Germany joining the UK as the most-represented countries. Italy, Spain and the Netherlands each have new number ones.

Another notable trend is the continued rise of China. The Asian giant is now home to two universities in the top 30: Peking and Tsinghua. The Beijing duo now outrank several prestigious institutions in Europe and the US. Meanwhile, almost all Chinese universities have improved, signalling that the country¡¯s commitments to investment has bolstered results year-on-year.

In contrast, two-fifths of the US institutions in the top 200 (29 out of 62) have dropped places. In total, 77 countries feature in the table.

Read our full analysis of the World University Rankings 2018 results

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