Four British institutions ranked in top six of world's universities

Improvements in research have seen Cambridge University and Imperial College London surpass Harvard University in the latest authoritative annual ranking of the world's top universities, published on Tuesday, with four British institutions in the top six.

The QS ranking of world universities, regarded as the most rigorous of its type, places Imperial and Cambridge as second equal, behind only the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the international stage in 2014, thanks to a year of impressive citations measured by QS's survey of academic output.

Harvard dropped from second to fourth overall. It was followed by Oxford and University College London in joint fifth place, with Stanford, Caltech, Princeton and Yale of the US filling out the rest of the top 10. Continue..

"These rankings support what our students, alumni, staff, friends and collaborators know, that Imperial is one of the world's great universities," said Professor Alice Gast, Imperial's new president of Imperial College and a leading chemical engineer. "Imperial has a rare ability to turn outstanding research into discoveries that have a real impact on the world."

Of the top 200 higher education institutions ranked by QS, the UK is represented by 29 and the US by 51, while Germany is the next best performer with 13. London has five in QS's top 100, compared with three for Boston and Hong Kong, and two for New York, Paris and Tokyo.

After looking through the list of top 200, the only African University spotted was the University of Cape Town, South Africa that was ranked 141^th.

See the top 200 university rankings in full here