'How the mighty have fallen': Number of US universities in top 100 falls, China take up more spots

American universities continue to witness a fall in their rankings while Chinese universities are on an incline.

Nevertheless, American and British colleges continue to dominate the top rankings, with the US taking up seven of the top ranks and Britain taking three of the top ten spots.

The England's University of Oxford, also once again was named the world's leading research university for the seventh year.

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The latest World University Rankings by Times Higher Education show that universities in China are witnessing a rise in their rankings, as they produce greater quantities of high-quality research.

A total of 15.5 million research publications and 121 million citations to those publications are analysed by the organisation for its rankings, along with over 40,000 responses to an annual survey on academic reputation and hundreds of thousands of other data points pertaining to a university's teaching environment, global perspective, and industry connections.

While the number of Chinese universities in the top 100 rose from two in 2018 to seven this year, US numbers fell from 43 in 2018 to 34 this year.

"If current trends remained the same, we would see China overtaking the U.S. in the coming years," predicts Phil Baty the rankings editor.

"The data is very clear: America can no longer take for granted its decadeslong dominance of world higher education and research, and it is China that is leading the challenge," the Wall Street Journal quotes Phil as saying.

Since the middle of the 1990s, there have been an increasing number of academic publications from China, but until this year, the Western academic world still held the view that Chinese scholarship was still inferior to that of the West.

However, according to an article that was published this spring in the journal Scientometrics, examining the quantitative traits and features of science and scientific research, China has surpassed the United States as the global leader in the production of "high impact" studies.

(With inputs from agencies)

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