In time for the start of the Olympics, a kind of academic Olympics has been conducted by one of China's largest universities and the results show University of Washington ranked 16th among 500 universities around the world.

Shanghai Jiao Tong University's sixth annual ranking of universities around the world was announced this week and will be officially released Aug. 15, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

"American institutions continue to dominate the top echelons of the influential list," says the Chronicle in a blog carrying top news stories from around the Web. "Fifty-four percent of the top 100 universities are in the United States."

Harvard University was No. 1 on the list, Stanford University No. 2 and eight other spots in the top 16 were claimed by private U.S. universities. The UW was among four public universities in the top 16 with University of California, Berkeley, at No. 3, University of California, Los Angeles, at 13 and University of California, San Diego, at 14. Last year, as with this year, the UW was ranked 16th on the list.

The top 16 includes two institutions from Europe: University of Cambridge and University of Oxford.

See the list at http://www.arwu.org/rank2008/ARWU2008_A(EN).htm.

Institutions were ranked by several indicators of academic and research performance including alumni and faculty winning Nobel Prizes, highly cited researchers and articles published in Nature and Science.

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