Chinese universities have continued to surge up the latest Times Higher Education Asia University Rankings, thanks to strong year-on-year improvement in the quality of their research. According to data underlying the ranking, released on February 7, the overall average score of the country’s institutions has climbed by more than 2.5 points since 2017, with about half this change a result of the increased citation impact of its scholarship. Other major research nations in the region have either been unable to match such improvements in research impact or, in the case of South Korea and Taiwan, have slipped back on this measure, which forms almost a third of the overall score.

The overall ranking — which uses the same 13 performance indicators as the main World University Rankings but with slightly different weightings to reflect the priorities of Asian institutions — has again been topped by the National University of Singapore.

China’s Tsinghua University has taken second place, swapping positions with its Beijing rival Peking University, which is third this year. Three institutions from Hong Kong, two from South Korea and one each from Singapore and Japan complete the rest of the Top 10. Overall, China has 63 institutions in the slightly expanded 2018 ranking, up from 54 last year, and a breakdown of its average scores in each metric shows that as well as citation impact, it has also made significant gains in research income and reputation of its universities.

Writing in the THE Asia University Rankings supplement, Phil Baty, editorial director for global rankings, says “two decades of focused investment in excellence” is “paying off” for the country. “After tens of billions of dollars invested under 1995’s Project 211 and 1998’s Project 985 to create world-class universities in China, yet more vast investment is secured through 2017’s ‘Double First Class’ plan to lift China’s leading institutions even higher,” he adds.

The country is still behind Japan, which has 89 institutions in the 2018 ranking, in terms of representation, but the average score of Japanese universities has remained relatively static with only slight improvements in most areas.

India, the third most represented country in the list, with 42 institutions, has also seen its average citation impact scores go up, although not as strongly as China. Improvements in its performance on metrics covering income, research productivity and Ph D awards also contributed to its overall score rising.

Meanwhile, in western Asia, Turkey is interesting for managing a positive outcome despite its reputation scores taking a serious knock. And Saudi Arabian universities had a relatively high overall score change driven by a large improvement in research productivity, despite falling back on some other metrics.