Times World Univ Rankings: No Indian institute among top 200

But 17 Indian universities among world's top 800

No Indian institute features among the top 200 universities in the world, according to Times Higher Education, which has published the twelfth edition of its World University Rankings. However, India has 17 universities in the newly expanded World University Rankings top 800, matching Brazil.

India has two institutions in the top 400, the Indian Institute of Science (the 251-300 group) and the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, (351-400 cohort).

The California Institute of Technology (US), the University of Oxford (UK) and Stanford University (US) are the top three institutes in the list. Others in the top ten include the University of Cambridge (UK), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) and Harvard University (US). Institutions from the US and UK dominate the top 10, with one institute from Switzerland.

Phil Baty, the editor of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, said it was good news for India that 17 of its institutions featured in this year's list of the world's best universities.

"But it will have to work harder to compete with other emerging economies such as China, which has 37 institutions in this year's rankings, and Russia, which has fewer institutions overall but a higher proportion in the upper echelons of the table," explained Baty.

The National University of Singapore holds Asia's number one spot (26) while China's two leading universities, Peking and Tsinghua, are at 42nd and joint 47th place, respectively.

Japan has two institutions in the top 200, the University of Tokyo (43) and Kyoto University (joint 88), while South Korea has four institutions in the top 200: Seoul National University (85), Pohang University of Science and Technology (116), the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (148) and Sungkyunkwan University (153).

The World University Rankings are partly based on publication and citation data from Elsevier's Scopus, the world's largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature, and includes analytics from SciVal, Elsevier's tool to calculate comparative research metrics.

The ranking features universities in 70 countries, with 29 new countries included this year. Countries entering this year include Indonesia, Malaysia, Ghana, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Latvia, Oman, Qatar and the Ukraine.