A total of 23 mainland universities managed to squeeze onto the world's best 500 universities in 2011.

In comparison, only eight mainland universities were listed in the first Academic Ranking of World Universities in 2003, when Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Center for World-Class Universities started to measure the performance of top universities worldwide.

American universities won most of the top 10 places and nearly half of the top 100 in the latest ranking, also known as the Shanghai Ranking, which was issued today.

Harvard University tops the list for the ninth consecutive year. The other Top 10 universities are: Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Cambridge, Caltech, Princeton, Columbia, Chicago and Oxford.

Switzerland's ETH Zurich (23rd) trumps Continental European universities, followed by Paris-Sud (40th) and Pierre and Marie Curie (41st) in France.

The best-ranked universities in Asia are University of Tokyo (21st) and Kyoto University (27th) in Japan.

Tsinghua University is the best among all domestic universities and is listed between the 151th and 200th places. Peking University, Fudan University, Nanjing University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, University of Science and Technology of China and Zhejiang University are ranked among the top 300.

Researchers didn't precisely rank the universities beyond the top 100 because of the minor differences between them.

The ranking evaluates universities' performances according to six objective indicators, including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, the number of highly cited researchers selected by Thomson Scientific, the number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science, and the number of articles indexed in the Science Citation Index's Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index.

Domestic universities won an advantage in the research publication index. But few of their research papers were cited by other researchers according to the Thomson Scientific.