The Australian National University is one of three Australian universities to make the 2010 Shanghai Jiao Tong world university ranking’s top 100.
ANU retained its 59th ranking, followed by the University of Melbourne which jumped from 75th place to 62nd place and the University of Sydney which also improved its standing from 94 to 92.
The top performer in the Asia-Pacific region was Tokyo University – again listed in 20th place followed by Kyoto in 24th position.
Chinese universities also performed well, with the number of Chinese universities in the top 500 reaching 34 – more than double the number in 2004 when there were just 16.
Top Chinese universities included Peking University, Tsinghua University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, all making it into the top 200.
Australia had 17 universities in the top 500 including the University 
of NSW which jumped from 166th to 159th place.
The US continued to dominate the list with eight universities in the top 10 and 54 in the top 100. Harvard remained in first place for the eighth consecutive year while the University of California’s Berkeley came in second, Stanford in third and MIT in fourth position. Britain’s Cambridge University came in fifth and Oxford in 10th place. Britain dropped from having 40 universities in the top 500 to 38.
The Jiao Tong annual ratings rank universities globally using a mix of indicators heavily focused on achievements in scientific research. The rankings are skewed according to a university’s number of alumni and staff with Nobel prizes, the number of highly cited researchers, the number of articles published and cited in top journals and the overall performance of universities with respect to their size.
