Australia’s top five universities each rise to a new ranking record

Australia’s top five universities have each risen to a record high in the Academic Ranking of World Universities.

The University of Melbourne is Australia’s best performer, ranked 32nd in the world in the Academic Ranking of World Universities. Picture: David Geraghty

Australia’s top five universities have thrown off the yoke of the pandemic and risen to a record high in the prestigious Academic Ranking of World Universities.

The 2022 rankings, which measure the research performance of the world’s academic ­institutions, show the University of Melbourne is Australia’s top ­research university, ranked at 32 compared with 33 last year, followed by the University of Queensland, which broke into the top 50 to be ranked 47, compared to 51st last year.

The University of Sydney was ranked 60, up from 69, UNSW was 64 compared to 65, and ­Monash University was 75, up from 80.

None of the top five has ever placed better in the Chinese-­produced rankings, which has ­become the world’s most sought after badge of research excellence in the two decades since it was established.

Seven Australian universities were named in the top 100, but while the upper five rose higher, the lower two – ANU and the University of Western Australia – each went backwards: ANU from 76 to 79 and UWA to 99 from 96.

The University of Sydney celebrated its improved ranking, pointing to a 52 per cent rise in one of the indicators used in the ranking: the number of highly cited researchers as determined by analytics company Clarivate.

Among them was Eddie Holmes, a global leader in the study of viral evolution who was first to publicly share the ­genome for Covid-19 in early 2020.

The rankings are based on public measurements of university research success, including numbers of science and social science papers published, numbers of highly cited researchers, numbers of papers published in prestigious journals Nature and Science, and numbers of Nobel prize and Fields medal-winners among academic staff and alumni.

US universities filled 15 of the top 20 places. Harvard was first, followed by Stanford and MIT.

The others in the top 10 were Cambridge, Berkeley, Princeton, Oxford, Columbia, Caltech and Chicago.

Neither China nor Hong Kong had any universities in the top 100 until 2016, when Tsinghua University and Peking University made the cut.