(oo/cm) The lists of university rankings has just grown a little longer. Last year the Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University drew up a scientific ranking of 500 universities all over the world (1). ETH Zurich comes off well. It gets the best marks of any Swiss university, ahead of the universities of Zurich, Basle, ETH Lausanne and the University of Berne. As far as Europe is concerned, only four British universities lie ahead of ETH Zurich, which attains position 25 in the global ranking.

According to the study, Harvard University in Cambridge, Boston is the best in the world, followed by further institutions in English speaking countries, such as MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at position 6. ETH Zurich is also busy winning prizes and publishing papers.

Scientific Criteria

The 500 universities included in the study were assessed according to five different criteria. These included the number of Nobel Prizes awarded to affiliated scientists in physics, chemistry, medicine or economics between 1911 and 2002. A further criterion was the number of highly cited researchers from 21 categories between 1981 and 1999. In addition, the authors of the study counted how many articles had been published in "Science" or "Nature" in the three previous years or articles in Science Citation Index-expanded and Social Science Citation Index,

Nobel Prize as proof of quality?

When it comes down to it all of the above criteria only reflect the research success of a university. In their commentary to "Academic Ranking of World Universities – 2003" the authors admit that a university's quality and reputation cannot be measured by mere numbers. In addition, there are great differences between individual universities and individual countries. They also say that it was technically difficult to obtain internationally comparable data. Only the chosen criteria remained as a method to evaluate research on an international scale.

This means that some important concerns are wholly neglected, for example, student satisfaction, the well-being of staff or the quality of course content. Nor is work in the engineering sciences taken into account. That ETH Zurich also comes off well in these areas has been shown in other studies.