MIT in Boston retained top spot as the world's best university for the third year in a row, helped by another impressive rise in research citations.
Cambridge was the best performing British institution for total research citations, an area heavily dominated by the more wealthy US universities.
Scores in the QS rankings comprise an equal balance of expert opinion and data on staffing levels, research citations and international students and faculty.
Cambridge was the sole UK institution to make the top 30 for research citations – while only UCL, Oxford and Imperial joined it in the top 50.
Institutions are ranked on 13 measures including teaching, research, citations, funding and international outlook, based on a mix of information supplied by each school and data from Thomson Reuters.
In a book that has its share of specious research citations she also notes that men are more apt than women to drown.
While a highly international student or faculty body is not in itself a measure of quality, there is a clear correlation between international intake and success in other areas such as academic reputation and research citations.
To measure the impact of research, citation-based measures like the total number of citations, the number of citations per published article or the h-index [1], have been proposed.
