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Harvard still dominates, though it fell to No. 3 on a list measuring academic output. Other American universities are falling farther behind their global peers.
Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, is now at the top of a global ranking of research output, supplanting Harvard University. Qilai Shen / The New York Times
By Mark Arsenault, New York Times Service
updated on January 15, 2026 | 1:21 PM
9 minutes to read
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Until recently, Harvard was the most productive research university in the world, according to a global ranking that looks at academic publication.
That position may be teetering, the most recent evidence of a troubling trend for American academia.
Harvard recently dropped to No. 3 on the ranking. The schools racing up the list are not Harvard’s American peers, but Chinese universities that have been steadily climbing in rankings that emphasize the volume and quality of research they produce.
The reordering comes as the Trump administration has been slashing research funding to American schools that depend heavily on the federal government to pay for scientific endeavors. President Donald Trump’s policies did not start the American universities’ relative decline, which began years ago, but they could accelerate it.
“There is a big shift coming, a bit of a new world order in global dominance of higher education and research,” said Phil Baty, chief global affairs officer for Times Higher Education, a British organization unconnected to The New York Times that produces one of the better-known world rankings of universities.
Educators and experts say the shift is a problem not just for American universities, but also for the nation as a whole.
“There is a risk of the trend continuing, and potential decline,” Baty said. “I use the word ‘decline’ very carefully. It’s not as if U.S. schools are getting demonstrably worse, it’s just the global competition: Other nations are making more rapid progress.”
Look back to the early 2000s, and a global university ranking based on scientific output, such as published journal articles, would be very different. Seven American schools would be among the top 10, led by Harvard University at No. 1.
Only one Chinese school, Zhejiang University, would even make the top 25.
Today, Zhejiang is ranked first on that list, the Leiden Rankings, from the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Seven other Chinese schools are in the top 10.
Harvard produces significantly more research now than it did two decades ago, but it has nonetheless fallen to third. And it is the only American university still near the top of the list. Harvard is still first in the Leiden rankings for highly-cited scientific publications.
The issue at top American universities is not falling production.