France’s Université Pierre et Marie Curie (39th), Paris Sud (46th) and the Ecole normale supérieure (87th) all landed in the top 100 of the Shanghai Ranking of the world’s best universities, which was published on Monday, reports FRANCE 24.
A total of 22 French schools placed in the top 500 ranking published Monday, making France the sixth-highest ranking country, after the US, China, Germany, the UK and Australia.
The Shanghai Ranking's "Academic Ranking of World Universities", which was launched in 2003, takes into account six criteria in order to rank the top 500 of the world’s 1,200 listed universities.
Criteria include the number of former students who have earned Nobel prizes, the number of researchers who are the most-cited in their field, and the number of articles published in the journals Science and Nature.
Critics have previously said that the Shanghai Ranking stresses science over the humanities in its grading.
Universities from mainland China broke into the global top 100 in the annual ranking for the first time while Harvard remained number one for the 14th consecutive year.
China's prestigious Tsinghua University was 58th, beating elite Peking University in 71st place. The National University of Singapore also entered the top 100 for the first time, tying for 83rd.
For the top 10, Stanford maintained second place but MIT dropped from third to fifth, with the University of California at Berkeley and the UK's University of Cambridge each moving up one spot to take third and fourth.
Princeton University was sixth again, with another three US institutions – the California Institute of Technology, Columbia University and the University of Chicago – in places eight to 10.
In the Asia-Pacific region, the University of Tokyo was top at number 20 overall.