In one of the most important university rankings in the world, USP (University of São Paulo) is the first university in Latin America to top the 21 Brazilian universities on the list. The Shanghai ranking was released today and is led by American companies.
To create the ranking, the ShanghaiRanking Consultancy organization uses six criteria, including the number of Nobel and Fields Prizes (which count as the Nobel Prize in mathematics) among graduate students and professors, the number of mostcited researchers in their disciplines, or the number of publications in the journals Science and Nature. The institution analyzed 2,500 universities and listed the top 1000.
Eight of the top ten are from the United States. Along with Harvard, which ranks first, Stanford, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Berkeley, Princeton, Columbia, California Institute of Technology, and the University of Chicago appear in the top 10, in that order.
Although the ranking comes from the Chinese city of Shanghai, most universities in China decided in March not to participate in such a list. Therefore, the ranking does not include big names in Chinese higher education.
Brazilian institutions only start appearing after the hundredth position.
Immediately after the number 100 in the list there is no definition of a specific position, only the block in which a specific educational institution has been classified is delimited. The USP thus ranks between position 101 and position 150.
Unicamp ranks second among Brazilian companies, ranking 301400. Another four universities in Brazil rank between 401500: UFMG, UFRJ, UFRGS and Unesp.
The full list can be accessed here.