UC Berkeley moved up to third place overall behind Harvard and Stanford in the 2013 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) global rankings of universities. This represents an improvement over last year’s fourth-place ranking, now held by MIT.
Berkeley is ranked third in the world using the Shanghai Jiao Tong University methodology, which focuses on quality of faculty and research. Berkeley is again the top-ranked public university, followed by UCLA (12th), UCSD (14th) and UCSF (18th).
UC Berkeley’s Office of Planning and Analysis released this primer on the rankings’ methodology:
The table shows Harvard with a large advantage in total score, followed by a relatively close range of scores for Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, and Cambridge.
The methodology uses four criteria to assess a university’s ranking: quality of education (worth 10% of the total), quality of faculty (40%), research output (40%), and per capita academic performance (10%). More specifically, these include Nobel Prize and Fields Medal winners among faculty and alumni weighted by decade received, highly cited researchers from 21 subject areas, the number of papers in Nature and Science published between 2008 and 2012, the number of papers indexed in Science Citation and Social Science Citation in 2012. The weighted scores of these indicators are divided by the FTE of academic staff to obtain the per capita performance rating.
The total score is derived by summing these, and each institutional score is then standardized to the top-scoring university, which is assigned 100.