Wikipedia Ranking of World Universities: the top 100

List ranks institutions by search engine results and Wikipedia appearances

December 15, 2015
Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge
Source: iStock
Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge

The UK has topped a ranking of the world’s most influential universities, based on an analysis of the number of times that higher education institutions are mentioned on Wikipedia.

The universities of Cambridge and Oxford took first and second place respectively, beating US rivals Harvard, Columbia and Princeton, which completed the top five.

Read more: Wikipedia should be better integrated into teaching

Germany’s Humboldt University of Berlin is the top-ranked institution outside the US and the UK in 11th place, followed by Sweden’s Uppsala University in 15th.

The ranking was devised by José Lages, of the University of Franche-Comté, and Dima Shepelyansky, who works in the Laboratory of Theoretical Physics at Paul Sabatier University.

The academics ranked the universities in descending order by their PageRank score (and the related 2DRank and CheiRank algorithms), which is an algorithm used by Google to rank websites in their search engine results, followed by the number of appearances in the 24 different language editions of Wikipedia (descending order) and the century in which they were founded (ascending order). 

Below is a list of the top 100 institutions in the Wikipedia Ranking of World Universities, including links to institutions that also feature in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2015-16. View the full list of 1,025 institutions here.

Wikipedia Ranking of World Universities: top 100

Rank Institution
1 University of Cambridge
2 University of Oxford
3 Harvard University
4 Columbia University
5 Princeton University
6 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
7 University of Chicago
8 Stanford University
9 Yale University
10 University of California, Berkeley
11 Humboldt University of Berlin
12 Cornell University
13 University of Pennsylvania
14 University of London
15 Uppsala University
16 University of Edinburgh
17 Heidelberg University
18 University of California, Los Angeles
19 New York University
20 University of Michigan
21 Johns Hopkins University
22 University of Vienna
23 University of Göttingen
24 London School of Economics
25 Moscow State University
26 University of Bologna
27 Leipzig University
28 California Institute of Technology
29 Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
30 University of Southern California
31 University of Tokyo
32 Leiden University
33 Lund University
34 Charles University in Prague
35 University College London
36 University of Copenhagen
37 École Normale Supérieure
38 University of Manchester
39 École Polytechnique
40 University of Bonn
41 University of Texas at Austin
42 Duke University
43 Carnegie Mellon University
44 Al-Azhar University
45 University of Helsinki
46 University of Virginia
47 Hebrew University of Jerusalem
48 University of Toronto
49 King's College London
50 Imperial College London
51 University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
52 Sapienza University of Rome
53 ETH Zurich – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich
54 University of Zurich
55 University of Washington
56 University of Minnesota
57 Georgetown University
58 University of Wisconsin–Madison
59 McGill University
60 University of Glasgow
61 University of Oslo
62 Peking University
63 Michigan State University
64 Brown University
65 University of Tübingen
66 Jagiellonian University
67 Saint Petersburg State University
68 Free University of Berlin
69 Kyoto University
70 University of Padua
71 Karolinska Institute
72 Waseda University
73 University of Florida
74 University of Geneva
75 Ohio State University
76 University of Jena
77 Keio University
78 University of Arizona
79 University of Maryland, College Park
80 Stockholm University
81 Trinity College Dublin
82 Boston University
83 University of Strasbourg
84 University of Tartu
85 Rutgers University
86 Institut Polytechnique des Sciences Avancées
87 University of Warsaw
88 Utrecht University
89 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
90 Rockefeller University
91 Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg
92 Tsinghua University
93 University of St Andrews
94 University of Amsterdam
95 Northwestern University
96 University of Notre Dame
97 Technical University of Berlin
98 University of Coimbra
99 Indiana University
100 University of Wrocław

ellie.bothwell@tesglobal.com

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