World's top 100 universities 2014: their reputations ranked by Times Higher Education

Harvard has once again topped the Times Higher Education’s reputation ranking of worldwide universities, with US institutions taking almost half of all the places on the top 100 list. Get the full data

• Get the 2013 rankings

Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts has been named the university with the best reputation worldwide in a ranking published today. Photograph: Porter Gifford/Corbis

Harvard university has retained its number one spot on the Times Higher Education’s world reputation ranking of universities, with US institutions taking eight of the top 10 positions.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford follow to make up the top three. Cambridge and Oxford are both down one place on last year’s rankings which puts them in fourth and fifth place respectively. The University of California, Berkeley, Princeton, Yale, California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Los Angeles take the remaining places in the top 10.

The US, with 46 institutions in the top 100, is named as an ”undisputed superpower when it comes to university brands” by the creators of the list. In the release, they also highlight what they call “worrying evidence of reputational decline among UK institutions.”

As in the past with these rankings, the UK has the second highest number of top 100 representatives and they’ve actually increased since last year - up one from nine in 2013. But the Times Higher Education argue, the UK’s overall showing has worsened since 2011, when it had 12 representatives and warns of “polarisation between the ‘golden triangle’ (London, Oxford and Cambridge) and the rest of the UK.” Six London universities make the top 100 - more than any other city in the world.

Both Imperial College and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) have moved up a place, to 13th and 24th respectively while University College London (UCL) has dropped five places to 25th. King’s College London is one of the most improved institutions in this year’s tables, rising from the 61-70 band to joint 43rd. The University of Edinburgh remains at 46th position, while the University of Manchester has dropped from 47th in 2013 to the 51-60 band. The London Business School and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine are both new entries to the list.

Commenting on the rankings, Bahram Bekhradnia, president of the UK’s Higher Education Policy Institute, said:

Given the UK’s size, this survey suggests we are still punching above our weight as far as research performance is concerned: at more than four times our size, the US has only around four times the number of universities in the top 100. What is worrying though is the apparent deterioration in the reputation of a number of our universities. At a time when despite economic problems others have sought to protect their research investment, we have seen a real-terms decline, which could amount to over 20 per cent in 10 years. We should expect our research output to follow: it is difficult to imagine why not.

“While reputation surveys do not tell you anything objective about quality, they nevertheless do reflect visibility and awareness by others of a university’s activities: academics are likely to be more aware of those with whom they’ve recently collaborated, those with recent relevant articles and those presenting at conferences. So a reputation survey such as this is likely to be a harbinger of things to come and a predictor of subsequent trends.

The rankings also highlight a big improvement for Germany which now has six universities represented in the top 100 - the third highest representation in the list behind the US and the UK.

The annual world reputation rankings, a subsidiary of the Times Higher Education world university rankings, are based based on the results of the Academic Reputation Survey carried out by Ipsos MediaCT for Thomson Reuters. The full methodology for the rankings along with the individual scores by university can be found on the Times Higher Education site.

Here are some other findings from the release:

Five countries are represented in the top 20: the US, UK, Japan, Canada and Switzerland and overall 20 countries are represented in the top 100

The University of Tokyo at 11th place, is the highest ranking university outside of the UK or US (down two places on last year’s rankings)

Three institutions included in the reputation rankings fail to make the top 200 of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings: Moscow State, Middle East Technical and São Paulo

King’s College London is Europe’s biggest riser – up from 61-70 to joint 43rd

You can see the full 2014 world reputation rankings below, we have also included the 2013, 2012 and 2011 positions in the downloadable spreadsheet which also contains breakdowns by country.