The top of the list is still dominated by US educational institutions, as has been the case for years.

California Institute of Technology once again took first place honours, followed closely by Stanford University, which took the #3 position. Massachusetts Institute of Technology crept in at #5.

Other high-scoring European universities are University of Cambridge (UK, #4, up from #5), Imperial College London (UK, #8, up from #9), ETH Zurich (Switzerland, #9, up from #13), and University College London (UK, #14, up from #22).

The first university from an EU country outside of the UK is Karolinska Institute in Sweden, occupying place 28.

The list is compiled by a methodology determined by Times Higher Education, a London-based magazine. Between 2004 and 2009 it collaborated with company Quacquarelli Symonds, but QS has since come up with its own list – and there are several others out there with different methodologies.

'Simplistic' ranking

The European Commission has in the past criticized the rankings for failing to "represent the diverse and multifunctional nature of universities and their research activities accurately."

"The Commission is of the opinion that many existing rankings do not really fulfil this purpose, for example because they focus on research aspects rather than teaching, and on entire institutions rather than programmes and departments", it said in 2010.

Four years later, it launched an alternative ranking system called U-Multirank.

"The idea is to avoid simplistic league tables which can result in misleading comparisons between institutions of very different types or mask significant differences in quality between courses at the same university", the commission said at the time.

Nevertheless, Wednesday's "simplistic" list can be expected to be cited by European universities that perform well, or by countries with a relatively high number of listings.

The top-200 list includes 63 universities from the United States, 34 from the UK, 20 from Germany, 12 from the Netherlands, 7 from Switzerland, 6 from Sweden, 5 from France, 4 from Belgium, and 3 each from Denmark, Italy, and Spain.

China only has two universities listed in the top-200: Peking University (#42, up from 48) and Tsinghua University (#47, up from 49).

The twenty best-scoring European universities are:

2. University of Oxford (UK)

4. University of Cambridge (UK)

8. Imperial College London (UK)

9. ETH Zürich – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (Switzerland)

14. University College London (UK)

23. London School of Economics and Political Science (UK)

24. University of Edinburgh (UK)

27. King's College London (UK)

28. Karolinska Institute (Sweden)

29. LMU Munich (Germany)

31. École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland)

35. KU Leuven (Belgium)

37. Heidelberg University (Germany)

47. Wageningen University and Research Center (The Netherlands)

49. Humboldt University of Berlin (Germany)

53. Technical University of Munich (Germany)

54. École Normale Supérieure (France)

56. University of Manchester (UK)

58. University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands)

62. Utrecht University (The Netherlands)