The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) ranking was conducted by researchers at the Center for World-Class Universities of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and considers six objectives: the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Field Medals, the number of highly cited researchers selected by Thomson Reuters, the number of articles published in the journals of Nature and Science, the number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index and per capita performance of a university. Over 1,200 universities are ranked by ARWU, and the best 500 are published, according to the ARWU website.

Harvard University is still number one in the world, for the 13th year, in the 2015 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) released on Saturday by the Center for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Harvard is followed by Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Cambridge, Princeton, Caltech, Columbia, Chicago and Oxford. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem ranks 67th, after having dropped in 2014 from 59th to 70th place.

The top 20 universities in the world for 2015, according to ARWU, are:

1. Harvard University

2. Stanford University

3. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

4. University of California, Berkley

5. University of Cambridge

6. Princeton University

7. California Institute of Technology

8. Columbia University

9. University of Chicago

10. University of Oxford

11. Yale University

12. University of California, Los Angeles

13. Cornell University

14. University of California, San Diego

15. University of Washington

16. John Hopkins University

17. University of Pennsylvania

18.University College of London

19. University of California, San Francisco

20. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich

Starting in 2003, ARWU has been presenting the world Top 500 universities annually, based on a set of objective indicators and third-party data.