Top 10 universities: U.S., Britain dominate ranking

America's Harvard has kept its place as the best university in the world with Britain's Cambridge climbing one place to second in a new table.

Of the top 10, eight were from the USA and the other two British, with Oxford dropping two places to 10th.

The respected Shanghai Jiao Tong list ranks higher education establishments on various criteria including their research and academic excellence.

And with American establishments receiving far more funding than others around the world, their dominance has continued.

Stanford dropped one place to third with the University of California, Berkeley, fourth and Massachusetts Institute fifth.

The other British universities in the top 100 were, in order, Imperial College, University College, Edinburgh, Manchester, Bristol, Sheffield, King's College, Nottingham and Birmingham.

Other factors that go into the rankings include the number of alumni who are Nobel prize winners, number of articles published in the journals Science and Nature and the number of researchers that have been cited.

This year, the table also gave a greater importance to arts and humanities than previously.

Shanghai Jiao Tong university started the top-500 list in 2003 to assess the gap between Chinese and other universities; it finished 341st, The Sky News reported.