Taipei, Sept. 3 (CNA) National Taiwan University (NTU) has been ranked the 113th best university in the world for 2022, down 16 places from its ranking for 2021 but still high historically.
In the Times Higher Education (THE) rankings released Thursday, NTU remained the best performing institution from among 40 Taiwanese universities to make the list, but its ranking slipped after becoming the first Taiwan-based university ever to crack the top 100 last year.
The 2022 version of the World University Rankings covered 1,662 higher-learning institutions across 99 countries and territories. It was the highest number of schools analyzed since the rankings were first published in 2011.
The latest rankings used 13 indicators to measure an institution's performance across five areas: teaching, research, citations, knowledge transfer and international outlook.
NTU placed in the top 100 in both teaching and research, in 76th and 63rd place, respectively, but it finished outside the top 500 in citations, outside the top 700 in international outlook, and tied for 154th in knowledge transfer.
Its scores in the three most heavily weighted categories accounting for 90 percent of the overall score -- teaching, research and citations -- were all down from last year.
NTU acknowledged the step back, attributing it to the relatively cutthroat competition among higher learning institutions, and said the university would strive to push forward to make up for what it lacks.
Still, NTU remained in the top 120 schools in the rankings for a third straight year after nearly falling out of the top 200 as recently as 2017 and 2018, when it placed 195th and 198th, respectively.
The best university of 2022, as ranked by the report, was the University of Oxford in England for a sixth year in a row, followed by the California Institute of Technology and Harvard University in the United States, both taking second place.
Taiwan increased the number of universities who made the cut, squeezing in 40 schools into the ranking, compared to 38 listed in 2021.
Taipei Medical University was ranked in a group of schools between 201st and 250th, the highest for any university other than NTU since National Tsing Hua University was ranked in the 226-250 tier in 2013.
