The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), commonly known as the Shanghai ranking, is a publication that was founded and compiled by the Shanghai Jiaotong University to rank universities globally. The rankings have been conducted since 2003 and updated annually. Since 2009, the rankings have been published by the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy.

The ARWU is regarded to be one of the three most influential and widely observed international university rankings, along with the QS World University Rankings and the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. Its consistent and objective methodology is praised when compared with other rankings. However, it has also been criticized for its heavy focus on the natural sciences over the social sciences or humanities, and over the quality of instruction.

The ranking considers every university that has any Nobel Laureates, Fields Medalists, Highly Cited Researchers, or papers published in Nature or Science. In addition, universities with significant amount of papers indexed by Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCIE) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) are also included. In total, more than 1000 universities are currently ranked and the best 500 are published on the web.

Ranking of the best 20 world universities - 2011 edition

Rank	University	Country	Country rank	Score	Publications score
1	Harvard University		1	100.0	100.0
2	University of California, Berkeley		2	72.4	70.6
3	Stanford University		3	72.1	69.7
4	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)		4	71.4	61.4
5	University of Cambridge		1	69.6	65.7
6	California Institute of Technology		5	64.4	46.9
7	Princeton University		6	60.8	44.3
8	Columbia University		7	60.4	69.9
9	University of Chicago		8	57.3	50.5
10	University of Oxford		2	56.4	68.5

10	University of Oxford		2	56.4	68.5
11	Yale University		9	54.6	62.0
12	Cornell University		10	52.6	59.5
13	University of California, Los Angeles		11	52.2	75.1
14	University of California, San Diego		12	50.0	65.1
15	University of Pennsylvania		13	49.0	68.6
16	University of Washington		14	48.7	72.5
17	University of Wisconsin - Madison		15	46.4	66.1
18	The Johns Hopkins University		16	46.0	64.0
18	University of California, San Francisco		17	46.0	60.7
20	The University of Tokyo		1	45.9	80.4