BEIJING, Aug. 13 (Xinhua) -- A Shanghai-based university has published a new ranking of the world's best universities, with Harvard on the top.

Among the top ten on the list, prepared by the Institute of Higher Education of Shanghai Jiaotong University, eight are American universities including Stanford, MIT, and Princeton.

The Cambridge and Oxford in Britain secured the fourth and tenth places, the Beijing Morning Post cited the list as reporting on Monday.

Out of the top 100 best universities, 54 are located in the United States, 31 are in Europe, and nine in the Asia and Pacific region.

However, Tsinghua and Peking, the most renowned universities in the Chinese mainland, ranked 167 and 228 respectively, lagging behind the 161st Taiwan University.

The list, the fifth of its kind made by the Shanghai-based university, was mainly based on six categories of criteria covering the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel and other academic prizes or having their research work published in domestic or the world's top academic journals.

More than 2,000 universities around the world have been assessed according to the criteria, but only the top 500 were made public.

Rankings of universities have become a necessary reference for an increasing number of Chinese students who pursue higher education abroad.

More than one million Chinese have studied abroad since the late 1970s, and over 100,000 go overseas for academic training every year since 2002, statistics from the Ministry of Education show.