Malaysian universities in world's top 500

Public universities show their strength.

Malaysia faces fierce competition in the higher education sector with neighboring countries like Singapore, and other countries in the Asian region like China, Hong Kong and India.

However, Malaysia has proven its capability to express itself as a strong competitor in its higher education by holding two spots in the 2015 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU).

University Malaya was ranked among the world’s top 400 universities and University Sains Malaysia was ranked in the top 500.

Singapore, Malaysia's closest rival held two spots as well where the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University were ranked in the top 200.

The selection of universities was based on the findings by Nobel Laureates, Fields Medalists, Highly Cited Researchers or papers published in Nature or Science.

In addition, universities with significant amount of papers indexed by Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCIE) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) are also included. In total, more than 1200 universities are actually ranked and the best 500 are published on the web.