Harvard retains the crown as top university for the eighth year in an annual ranking of the world's universities which is dominated by the United States but shows China's performance improving.

一项世界大学年度排名日前出炉，哈佛大学连续第八年高居排行之首。在今年的榜单上，美国大学占据多数，但中国大学的排名也有所上升。

The 2010 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU世界大学学术排名), published since 2003 by the Center for World-Class Universities of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, said the United States dominates the list with eight in the top 10 and 54 in the top 100.

Joining Harvard in the top 10 were the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; California Institute of Technology; Princeton; Columbia and Chicago. Yale came 11th.

The best ranked British universities were Cambridge, slipping to fifth place from fourth last year, and Oxford¹ retaining the 10th position. Overall the number of British universities in the top 500 rankings dropped to 38 from 40.

But the ranking, initially²（最初，首先） set up to find the global standing³ of Chinese universities, showed Asian universities were advancing up the list with 106 from the Asia Pacific region making the top 500 and Chinese universities performing better.

"While the ranking methodology（方法学，方法论） has been kept the same, the number of top 500 Chinese universities reaches 34 in 2010, which is more than double that in 2004 (16)," Shanghai Jiao Tong University said in a statement.

Chinese universities in the top 200 included Peking; Tsinghua and Chinese University of Hong Kong.

The ARWU uses six indicators⁴ to rank universities globally including the number of alumni（校友，男校友） and staff with Nobel prizes, the number of highly cited researchers, the number of articles published and cited in top journals and the per capita performance with respect to（关于，至于） size of the institution.