The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2023 include 1,799 universities across 104 countries and regions, making them the largest and most diverse university rankings to date.

The table is based on 13 carefully calibrated performance indicators that measure an institution’s performance across four areas: teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.

This year’s ranking analysed over 121 million citations across more than 15.5 million research publications and included survey responses from 40,000 scholars globally. Overall, we collected over 680,000 datapoints from more than 2,500 institutions that submitted data.

Trusted worldwide by students, teachers, governments and industry experts, this year’s league table reveals how the global higher education landscape is shifting.

View the World University Rankings 2023 methodology

The University of Oxford tops the ranking for the seventh consecutive year. Harvard University remains in second place, but the University of Cambridge jumps from joint fifth last year to joint third.

The highest new entry is Italy’s Humanitas University, ranked in the 201-250 bracket.

The US is the most-represented country overall, with 177 institutions, and also the most represented in the top 200 (58).

Mainland China now has the fourth-highest number of institutions in the top 200 (11, compared with 10 last year), having overtaken Australia, which has dropped to fifth (joint with the Netherlands).

Five countries enter the ranking for the first time – all of them in Africa (Zambia, Namibia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Mauritius).

Harvard tops the teaching pillar, while Oxford leads the research pillar. Atop the international pillar is the Macau University of Science and Technology.

Overall, 1,799 universities are ranked. A further 546 universities are listed with “reporter” status, meaning that they provided data but did not meet our eligibility criteria to receive a rank, and agreed to be displayed as a reporter in the final table.

Read our analysis of the World University Rankings 2023 results

Download a copy of the World University Rankings 2023 digital report

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