LONDON, England (AFP) - America's Harvard retained its place as the top institution in The Times newspaper's Higher Education Supplement 2005 world university rankings, the British daily said Thursday.

Fellow US university the Massachusetts Institute of Technology moved up a position to second place, while ancient British universities Cambridge and Oxford leapfrogged US rivals Stanford and Berkeley into third and fourth place respectively.

The United States is home to 54 of the top 200 universities, with Britain home to 24, ahead of Australia in third place with 17.
The second annual rankings gauge the views of more than 2,000 academics from across the world.

The world's top 200 universities are in 31 countries, the rankings revealed. All but two are in Europe, Asia or North America. The exceptions are the National Autonomous University of Mexico and São Paulo in Brazil.

Aside from Cambridge, Oxford, the London School of Economics (11th) and Imperial College London (13th) in Britain, France's Ecole Polytechnique (10th) is the only other European university to secure a top 20 position.

The Netherlands is continental Europe's top higher education nation, with ten universities in the top 200, ahead of France and Germany with nine each.

Only two Russian universities feature from eastern Europe.
The rankings use the results of a survey of 2,375 academics from across the world, spanning disciplines.

These are combined with measures including the number of times that research papers are cited by academic colleagues, staff-to-student ratios and the number of students and staff recruited from overseas.

This year's analysis also includes a measure based on the views of international employers on which universities they prefer to recruit from.

Richard Lambert, the former Financial Times business daily editor who produced a review of business-university collaboration for the British government said the results reflected well on Britain.

However, he added: "I would not want them to be a cause for complacency.

"The UK's selective research funding means that the top ten universities get a bigger share of the cash than in any other European country. "But countries such as Germany have recognised the problem and are planning to channel extra cash to their elite universities."

A spokesperson for Cambridge, which was voted the world's top science university, said they were pleased to have done well in a ranking that measures quality in both teaching and research.

John Hood, vice-chancellor of Oxford, said: "Our place among the handful of truly world-class universities, despite the financial challenges we face, is testament to the quality and the drive of the members of the university."

2005 ranking (2004 ranking in brackets):

1 (1) Harvard University (USA)
2 (3) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)
3 (6) Cambridge University (Britain)
4 (5) Oxford University (Britain)
5 (7) Stanford University (USA)
6 (2) University of California, Berkeley (USA)
7 (8) Yale University (USA)
8 (4) California Institute of Technology (USA)
9 (9) Princeton University (USA)
10 (27) Ecole Polytechnique (France)
11 (52) Duke University (USA)
11 (11) London School of Economics (Britain)
13 (14) Imperial College London (Britain)
14 (23) Cornell University (USA)
15 (17) Beijing University (China)
16 (12) Tokyo University (Japan)
17 (20) University of California, San Francisco (USA)
17 (13) University of Chicago (USA)
19 (22) Melbourne University (Australia)
20 (19) Columbia University (USA)

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