The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), often called the Shanghai ranking, is published by ShanghaiRanking. It scores universities on six indicators of academic and research performance. This note summarises the 2025 methodology for staff who prepare ranking data.
Indicators and weights (ARWU 2025)
| Criterion | Indicator | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Quality of education | Alumni: alumni who won Nobel Prizes or Fields Medals | 10% |
| Quality of faculty | Award: staff who won Nobel Prizes or Fields Medals | 20% |
| HiCi: Highly Cited Researchers | 20% | |
| Research output | N&S: papers published in Nature and Science | 20% |
| PUB: papers indexed in the Science Citation Index-Expanded and the Social Sciences Citation Index | 20% | |
| Per capita performance | PCP: the weighted score of the five indicators above divided by the number of full-time equivalent academic staff | 10% |
Source: ShanghaiRanking, ARWU 2025 methodology (weights and data years).
How the score is calculated
- For each indicator, the highest-scoring institution is given 100 and the others are expressed as a percentage of it.
- For institutions specialised in humanities and social sciences, the N&S indicator is excluded and its weight is redistributed to the other indicators.
- The 2025 edition uses the November 2024 Clarivate list of Highly Cited Researchers, Nature and Science articles from 2020 to 2024, and Web of Science articles of 2024.
- ARWU evaluates more than 2,500 universities each year but publishes only the top 1,000 in its general ranking (according to the Tunisian outlet Webdo).
What it means for data preparation
Five of the six indicators count prizes, listed researchers and papers that a database attributes to an institution, and the sixth divides the result by staff numbers. Results therefore depend on how researchers and papers are linked to the university in the source databases. Unlike the THE Sustainability Impact Ratings, ARWU does not reward policies or sustainability reports: the evidence pages of this site do not feed any ARWU indicator.
UTM's position, as reported
- ShanghaiRanking lists the Universite de Tunis El Manar in the 901-1000 band of ARWU 2024, and at 401-500 in Mathematics and in Public Health in its 2023 Global Ranking of Academic Subjects.
- In 2020 UTM announced that it was in the 901-1000 band for the third consecutive year, first in Tunisia and the Maghreb (UTM press release, August 2020).
- According to Webdo (August 2026), no Tunisian university appears in the ARWU 2026 general ranking, which lists the top 1,000.
See also the notes on Times Higher Education and QS, and UTM's results.