Top 20 universities in 2017 [Photo/ShanghaiRanking Consultancy]

Two Shanghai universities, namely Fudan University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, are ranked among top 150 on the newly released 2017 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU).

Harvard University remains the number one in the world for the 15th year. Stanford continues to be the second top university. The University of Cambridge overtakes MIT and Berkeley and rises to the third best university in the world.

A total of 45 universities in mainland China enter the top 500 of ARWU, while 12 universities in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan are on the list. Tsinghua University (ranked 48th) enters the top 50 for the first time. Fudan University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the University of Science and Technology of China and Zhejiang University are ranked between 101st and 150th.

ARWU uses six objective indicators to rank world universities, including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, number of highly cited researchers selected by Thomson Reuters, number of articles published in the journals of Nature and Science, number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, and per capita performance of a university.