World’s top universities in 42 subjects

The sixth edition of the QS World University Rankings by Subject has been released, featuring a record 42 disciplines, making it the largest-ever ranking of its kind.

Harvard and MIT continue to take the lion's share of top places, leading in twelve subjects each. Sixteen different institutions top at least one of the subjects.

In the six new disciplines ranked, Harvard leads Anthropology and Social Policy and Administration while Cambridge leads Archaeology.  Juilliard tops Performing Arts. Colorado School of Mines tops Mineral Engineering while University of Pennsylvania leads Nursing. The chart below features the universities achieving the most numerous placements within the top-ten.

    Cambridge                                     36

    Berkeley                                      35

    Stanford                                      33

    Oxford                                        33

    Harvard                                       30

    MIT                                           22

    LSE                                           13

    National University of Singapore              13

    Princeton                                     12

    ETH Zurich                                    11

    Yale                                          10

    Imperial College London                        9

    UCL                                            9

    University of Copenhagen                       8

    University of Chicago                          7

    University of Hong Kong                        6

    Caltech                                        5

    Columbia                                       5

    The University of Tokyo                        5

    University of Michigan                         5

    UPenn                                          5

    Australian National University                 4

    Karolinska Institute                           4

    NYU                                            4

    Delft University of Technology                 3

    King's College London                          3

    University of Wisconsin-Madison                3

Ben Sowter, Head of the QS Intelligence Unit, said: "Though US and UK remain dominant, our most inclusive rankings yet show that excellence can be found in an ever-increasing number of places. Nations like Austria, Finland, South Africa, Brazil, and China can be found in the top ten of our tables. Our new top 100 for Performing Arts acknowledges academic excellence in 27 different countries, while our top 200 for Business & Management recognizes it in 33."

In continental Europe the countries with highest number of placements among the top-ten are: Switzerland (11), Netherlands (8), Sweden (6), France (3) and Italy (2). In Asia-Pacific: Singapore (15), Australia (9), Japan (7), Hong Kong (6), Mainland China (5).

Brazil dominates Latin America, with Universidade de Sao Paulo ranking 9th for Dentistry. South Africa leads its continent with Cape Town University 9th in Development Studies.

In the Middle East, the top performing country is Saudi Arabia, with KFUPM, ranked 46= in Mineral Engineering.

The expert opinion of 76,798 academics and 44,426 employers informed the results, alongside the analysis of 28.5 million research papers and over 113 million citations sourced from the Scopus/Elsevier bibliometric database.

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