The UK has topped a ranking of the world’s most influential universities, based on an analysis of the number of times that higher education institutions are mentioned on Wikipedia.
The universities of Cambridge and Oxford took first and second place respectively, beating US rivals Harvard, Columbia and Princeton, which completed the top five.
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Germany’s Humboldt University of Berlin is the top-ranked institution outside the US and the UK in 11th place, followed by Sweden’s Uppsala University in 15th.
The ranking was devised by José Lages, of the University of Franche-Comté, and Dima Shepelyansky, who works in the Laboratory of Theoretical Physics at Paul Sabatier University.
The academics ranked the universities in descending order by their PageRank score (and the related 2DRank and CheiRank algorithms), which is an algorithm used by Google to rank websites in their search engine results, followed by the number of appearances in the 24 different language editions of Wikipedia (descending order) and the century in which they were founded (ascending order).
Below is a list of the top 100 institutions in the Wikipedia Ranking of World Universities, including links to institutions that also feature in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2015-16. View the full list of 1,025 institutions here.