With nine UK universities – all Russell Group – listed in the top 100, Director General of the Russell Group, Dr Wendy Piatt, highlighted the importance of the task ahead for the country’s higher education institutions.

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem is Israel’s leading academic institution according to the latest Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) compiled by China’s Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

The University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University and the California Institute of Technology remained in the same places – ranking fourth, sixth and seventh respectively. The Hebrew University is now ranked 27 positions above its initial 94th place ranking in 2003.

The Rehovot-based institute was the only non-US research body to make it to the top ten on the list, which was published by the Center for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands, otherwise known by its Dutch acronym CWTS.

Utrecht University has once again been named the best research university in the Netherlands.

More than 1,200 universities are ranked by ARWU every year and the best 500 are published. Other factors included the number of alumni as well as the staff that won Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals.

The Shanghai Ranking was established in 2003 with the aim to identity the global standing of top Chinese universities while comparing them to 500 of the world’s leading institutes.

The Hebrew University ranked 67th, up three places from last year’s rankings, while the Technion was ranked 77th, up one place from 2014.

NTU professor of library and information science Huang Mu-hsuan (黃慕萱), a long-time researcher of appraisals on academic performance, said the ranking is heavily influenced by its grading criteria.

Harvard University continued to dominate the chart, claiming the top spot for the 13th consecutive year, followed by Stanford University.