The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2022 was released on 2 September 2021. The United Kingdom’s University of Oxford successfully defended its first position and ranked as the best university in the world for the sixth consecutive year. It was followed by the USA’s California Institute of Technology and Harvard University in the second and third positions, respectively. The universities from the United States and the United Kingdom continue to dominate the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2022.

The Times World University Rankings 2022 include over 1600 universities across 99 countries. This year’s ranking analyzed more than 108 million citations across over 14.4 million research publications and included survey responses from almost 22,000 scholars globally. Overall, they collected over 430,000 data points from more than 2,100 institutions that submitted data.

Overall, 1,662 universities are ranked. A further 452 universities are listed with “reporter” status, meaning that they provided data but did not meet our eligibility criteria to receive a rank.

The World University Rankings 2022 methodology

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings are the only global performance tables that judge research-intensive universities across all their core missions: teaching, research, knowledge transfers, and international outlook. We use 13 carefully calibrated performance indicators to provide the most comprehensive and balanced comparisons, trusted by students, academics, university leaders, industry, and governments.

The performance indicators are grouped into five areas: Teaching (the learning environment); Research (volume, income, and reputation); Citations (research influence); International outlook (staff, students, and research); and Industry income (knowledge transfer).