Not a single university of Bangladesh can be placed among the top 500 institutions around the globe in the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) 2013, also known as the Shanghai Rankings.
The list is topped and occupied mostly by the US universities, followed by those in Europe.
Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science (IIS) is the only institution (somewhere between 300 and 400) from South Asia that managed to get a position in the list.
Harvard University was ranked first with full 100 points. It has been holding the top position since 2003 when the ranking was launched.
The US universities have captured 17 positions of the top 20 slots, with two from the UK and one being occupied by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich. Of the 500 universities ranked, the US universities captured a total of 182 slots; European universities occupied 200 slots. As many as 17 Chinese universities were included as well.
The list, prepared by Centre for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (CWCU) and Shanghai Ranking Consultancy, was published on Thursday after scrutinising more than 1,000 universities.
There has always been a gap of over 25 points with the second position Stanford University holds the position for the third consecutive year. University of California was ranked third position this year followed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and University of Cambridge.
ARWU considers every university that has any Nobel Laureates, field medallists, highly-cited researchers, or papers published in Nature or Science.
In addition, universities with significant amount of papers indexed by the Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCIE) and the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) are also included.
Universities are also ranked by several indicators of academic or research performance, and the per capita academic performance of an institution. For each indicator, the highest scoring institution is assigned a score of 100, and other institutions are calculated as a percentage of the top score.
Harvard also topped the list of universities in terms of subject fields: natural sciences and mathematics, life and agricultural sciences, clinical medicine and pharmacy, social science, physics, chemistry and economics/business.
MIT is best for engineering technology and computer sciences, Princeton for mathematics while Stanford for computer science.
