Sussex has jumped back up into the top 20 UK universities in the world, according to the latest set of global rankings to be published.

The newly released Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) 2020 has placed the University 16–20 nationally – up from 17–21 in 2019.

The rise has been driven largely by a significant increase in the influence of Sussex research on the global academic community. The University jumped 108 places globally in the Highly Cited Indicator, thanks to an impressive showing in the 2019 Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researchers list, in which Sussex had a record seven academics included.

Overall, the rankings system has placed the University of Sussex among the best 151 to 200 institutions in the world – a position that is unchanged from last year’s list.

The UK has 65 Top 1000 universities listed in the 2020 ARWU, up from 61 last year, with 36 listed in the Top 500 (including eight in the Top 100).

The ARWU rankings methodology is based on a range of indicators including quality of faculty, highly cited researchers and research outputs.

The number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, the number of Highly Cited Researchers, the number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index – Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, and per capita performance are all factored into the final rankings.