World's Top 100 Research Universities

Many methods have been applied by various organisations to rank the world's top universities. This version focuses on quality of research.

Various organisations have ranked the world universities. The results varies in accordance to differences in the methodology they used. Shanghai Jiao Tong University listed Academic Ranking of World Universities 2006. It is criticised as it is biased towards natural sciences by including number of Nobel Prizes and Field Medals and articles published in Nature and Science. Besides, The Times Higher Education Supplement announced World University Rankings 2006. The later also faces criticism due to the more subjective nature of its assessment criteria, which are largely based on a 'peer review' system of 1000 academics in various fields. Both versions mainly calculated the ranking of universities based on the "size"-related criteria, i.e. number of publications, staff, and students. This can be misleading for assessing the research capacity of the universities. The "size" of university does not count the performance of research and researchers. Therefore, The University of Groningen Ranking of Research Universities attempts to fill this gap.

The ranking was based on citations per paper as an indicator of quality of research. This is a simple method but it can provide general indication for researchers and for ones who look for good research-based universities. Why? Because research is the very basic identity for many world class universities -- off course we also cannot undermine the existence of professional universities but they are not comparable.

However, any ranking procedure using university level as unit of analysis cannot be used as a main guide to judge the quality of particular subject at certain university. It is common that each university is strong in certain parts and is weak in other sides. Therefore, someone -- someday and somehow -- probably shall rank faculties and research institutes associated with urban and regional studies (?).