Academic Ranking of World Universities

The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), commonly called the Shanghai ranking, is a list of the world's best universities made by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The rankings have been made since 2003 and they are updated each year. As of 2012, Harvard University remains top. The ranking is used by the Chinese to compare other colleges and universities to their own universities.
The ranking uses a special formula to determine how to rank universities. It uses such things as how many Nobel Prizes university people have won and how many papers university scientists have published in the journals Science and Nature. Over 1,200 universities are ranked.