It's a podium position it has never relinquished in 22 years: Harvard has once again claimed top spot in the 2024 edition of the highly scrutinized Shanghai Ranking, published on Thursday, August 15. Conceived in 2003 by China's Jiao-Tong University, this annual ranking list focuses primarily on research in the hard sciences, to distinguish the 1,000 institutions with the highest "performance," out of more than 2,500 examined worldwide.

Reflecting the continuing dominance of British and American institutions at the top of the rankings, Harvard shines, as it did last year, alongside two other American universities: Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They are followed by Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. Another British flagship, Oxford University, moves up one place (6^th), behind Berkeley (5^th) and ahead of Princeton (7^th), both American.

In France, the four institutions that were already in the world's top 100 are moving up a notch. Leading the way is Paris-Saclay University, which climbed three places in the top 15. The university, which has had an eventful year amid the crisis surrounding the election of its president, has climbed for the first time to 12^th place worldwide, on an equal footing with the American university Cornell.

Six criteria

Paris-Saclay, created by the merger of several faculties, grandes écoles and national research organizations in 2020, stands out as the highest-ranked university on the European continent, according to the Shanghai Ranking consultancy, which has been producing the rankings since 2009. The second-ranked institution on the Old Continent, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, is a little further down the list, in 21^st place.

In France, alongside Paris-Saclay, momentum is also favorable for Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL), which has moved up 8 places (ranked 33^rd), Sorbonne University (to 41^st, after being 46^th in 2023) and, finally, Paris Cité University
(60^th, formerly 69^th), the result of the 2019 merger of the universities Paris-Descartes and Paris-Diderot and the attachment of the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris.

The Shanghai Ranking is based on six criteria:

• the number of Nobel laureates and Fields medallists among alumni;
• the number of Nobel laureates and Fields medallists among researchers;
• the number of researchers, mainly in the hard sciences, most cited in their disciplines;
• the number of articles published in the journals Nature and Science;
• the number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index;
• academic performance in relation to the size of the institution.

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