Caltech Again Named World's Top University in Times Higher Education Global Ranking

PASADENA, Calif.—The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has been rated the world's number one university in the 2012–2013 Times Higher Education global ranking of the top 200 universities.

Oxford University, Stanford University, Harvard University, and MIT round out the top five.

"We are pleased to be among the best, and we celebrate the achievements of all our peer institutions," says Caltech president Jean-Lou Chameau. "Excellence is achieved over many years and is the result of our focus on extraordinary people. I am proud of our talented faculty, who educate outstanding young people while exploring transformative ideas in an environment that encourages collaboration rather than competition."

Times Higher Education compiled the listing using the same methodology as in last year's survey. Thirteen performance indicators representing research (worth 30 percent of a school's overall ranking score), teaching (30 percent), citations (30 percent), international outlook (which includes the total numbers of international students and faculty and the ratio of scholarly papers with international collaborators, 7.5 percent), and industry income (a measure of innovation, 2.5 percent) make up the data. Included among the measures are a reputation survey of 17,500 academics; institutional, industry, and faculty research income; and an analysis of 50 million scholarly papers to determine the average number of citations per scholarly paper, a measure of research impact.

In addition to placing first overall in this year's survey, Caltech came out on top in the teaching indicator as well as in subject-specific rankings for engineering and technology and for the physical sciences.

"Caltech held on to the world's number one spot with a strong performance across all of our key performance indicators," says Phil Baty, editor of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. "In a very competitive year, when Caltech's key rivals for the top position reported increased research income, Caltech actually managed to widen the gap with the two universities in second place this year—Stanford University and the University of Oxford. This is an extraordinary performance."

Data for the Times Higher Education's World University Rankings were provided by Thomson Reuters from its Global Institutional Profiles Project, an ongoing, multistage process to collect and validate factual data about academic institutional performance across a variety of aspects and multiple disciplines.

The Times Higher Education site has the full list of the world's top 400 schools and all of the performance indicators.