Academic Ranking of World Universities... How it's Made?

Like me, many of you already should have questioned themselves  how can anyone classify something as vast in terms of areas of knowledge as a university. How do they classify art? science? sports?...

Classifying Universities is always subjective and even today still no ranking was considered the official one.Despite that the one considered the most credible is the "Academic Ranking of World Universities", commonly known as the Shanghai ranking.

Since it was created, back in 2003, it has attracted a lot of attention from media, governments and universities. In 2005, only two years after its creation, a survey on higher education published by "The Economist" commented ARWU as "the most widely used annual ranking of the world's research universities." In 2010, the "Chronicle of Higher Education" called ARWU "the best-known and most influential global ranking of universities".

The ranking compared 1200 higher education institutions worldwide according to a formula that took into account alumni winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals (10 percent), staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals (20 percent), highly-cited researchers in 21 broad subject categories (20 percent), articles published in the journals Nature and Science (20 percent), the Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index (20 percent) and the per capita academic performance (on the indicators above) of an institution (10 percent).

So what was the result?

I will let you all know in the next post.