Wikipedia Ranking of World Universities: the top 100

List ranks institutions by search engine results and Wikipedia appearances

December 15, 2015

By Ellie Bothwell

Twitter: @elliebothwell

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 Oxfordtook first and second place respectively, beating US rivals Harvard, Columbia and Princeton, which completed the top five.

Global Employability University Ranking 2015 results

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 devisedby 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