NTU performs solidly in a Chinese university survey

National Taiwan University stands above universities in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China in terms of teaching and research rankings, according to a poll conducted by Shanghai Jiaotong University which was released yesterday.

A total of 16 leading universities from the three territories made this year's list of top 500 universities in the world in terms of teaching and research excellence.

Among the 16 institutes from Taiwan, Hong Kong and China in the top-500 list, National Taiwan University took the lead.

It was followed by the Chi-nese University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong University of Technology, then Peking University, Tsinghua University and Shanghai Jiaotong University in China, then Taiwan's National Cheng Kung University, the poll said.

Shanghai Jiaotong University conducted the annual survey based on criteria, including the number of Nobel Prize winners serving as instructors at the schools, the number of "quality researchers" and the number of research papers and essays published in important international periodicals such as Nature or Science.

The US remains the largest source of leading universities in the world, claiming 170 entries, followed by Germany with 43, Britain with 42 and Japan with 36, the poll said.

The top three universities in the world were Harvard University, Stanford University and Cambridge University. Yale fell out of the top 10 from eighth place last year, the poll said.