Two Greek universities, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki are included in this year’s list of top 500 universities, that was published by the Center for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

The 2014 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) was released on Friday, August 15. The list that is presented annually starting from 2003 features the world Top 500 universities, based on transparent methodology and reliable data.

Harvard University remains the number one in the world for the 12th year, while the other Top 10 universities are: Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Cambridge, Princeton, Caltech, Columbia, Chicago and Oxford.
ETH Zurich (19th) takes first place in Continental Europe, followed by Pierre & Marie Curie (35th), University of Copenhagen (39th) overtakes Paris-Sud (42nd) in France as the third best university in Continental Europe.

University of Tokyo (21st) and Kyoto University (26th) top other universities in Asia. University of Melbourne (44th) becomes the highest ranked university in this region in the history of ARWU.

ARWU has been recognized as the precursor of global university rankings and the most trustworthy league table. ARWU adopts six objective indicators to rank world universities, including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, the number of Highly Cited Researchers, the number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science, the number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index – Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, and per capita performance.

More than 1200 universities are actually ranked by ARWU every year and the best 500 universities are published.