Yesterday, the official ARWU rankings for 2018 were released, with 15 universities in Taiwan making the list year, an improvement from the 13 seen on last year's list and an all time high for Taiwanese colleges on the list. Although the number of universities included overall have increased as well from 800 last year to 1,000 this year. 

The top ranked Taiwanese university on the list was National Taiwan University (NTU), which retained its same position as last year in the 151-200 range. No other Taiwanese universities cracked the top 200, with China Medical University (Taiwan) listed in the 201-300 range, National Cheng Kung University in the 301-400 range, Chang Gung University and Kaohsiung Medical University in the 401-500 range, to round out the top five Taiwanese finishers. 

Top five universities on the list remained the same as last year: Harvard University, Stanford University, University of Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and University of California, Berkeley. 

Huang Mu-hsuan (黃慕萱), Dean of Literature at NTU told Liberty Times that ARWU is focusing on the academic performance of the universities and paying attention to whether there are Nobel Laureates, scholars whose papers are highly cited, and even counting the number of papers published in famous international journals such as Nature and Science. There are many papers in the fields of medicine and biomedicine, therefore universities with medical departments are relatively popular in this ranking, said, Huang.  

Huang believes that the main reason why more Taiwanese universities made it to the list this year was because it was expanded to 1,000. Though on a whole Taiwanese universities dropped down the list, certain schools rose in the rankings, with NTU rising three spots, National Yang-Ming University (NYMU) shooting up 40 spots. Huang said that NYMU's improved ranking was probably the result of progress with its academic performance, while Asian University and National Taiwan Normal University made the list for the first time. 

The complete list of Taiwanese universities on the list in order from highest to lowest are as follows:

1. National Taiwan University
2. China Medical University
3. National Cheng Kung University
4. Chang Gung University
5. Kaohsiung Medical University
6. National Tsing Hua University
7. National Chiao Tung University
8. National Yang-Ming University
9. National Central University
10. Taipei Medical University
11. National Chung Hsing University
12. National Chung Cheng University
13. Asia University
14. National Taiwan University of Science and Technology
15. National Taiwan Normal University

FROM：Taiwan News