Once again, Nicolaus Copernicus University has found itself on the list of the Academic Ranking of World Universities among the one thousand best universities in the world. In this year's edition of the oldest global ranking, seven Polish higher education institutions were classified.
The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), called the Shanghai Ranking, is regarded as the precursor of global classifications. It was published for the first time in July 2003. From among more than 2,500 universities listed in it, a ranking of the top one thousand is published. The ARWU ranking is prepared by the Institute of Higher Education at Jiao Tong University in Shanghai (hence the name “Shanghai Ranking").
In 2025 ARWU records seven of the best Polish universities. Last year it included eight higher education institutions from Poland, in 2023 nine, and three years ago – eleven.
In this year's ranking, just as in the previous year, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń was classified in the tenth hundred (places 901–1000). In the same range were also Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Warsaw University of Technology, and Wrocław University of Science and Technology. The highest-ranked in Poland are the University of Warsaw (401–500), Jagiellonian University (501–600), and AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków (801–900).
The podium of the world ranking is invariably occupied by three American universities: Harvard University, Stanford University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The compiled ranking takes into account the scientific and research achievements of higher education institutions. The creators of ARWU (Academic Ranking of World Universities) , in preparing the annual rankings, take into consideration objective indicators, including: international scientific successes, the number of graduates and staff who have received the Nobel Prize or the Fields Medal, the number of the most frequently cited researchers based on Clarivate data, the number of publications in the prestigious journals Nature and Science, and the number of publications listed in selected citation indexes (Science Citation Index – Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index).