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This is the second year of The Times Higher 's World 51¹ú²úÊÓƵ Rankings.

We will publish all the results this month. But before we print the full rankings of the world's top 200 universities, we will present faculty-level analyses. These begin this week with the top institutions for science and technology, which are followed by top universities in biomedicine (October 14) and those for the social sciences and the arts and humanities (October 21).

The tables are based on a world-spanning peer review involving 2,375 research-active academics. Each was asked about the top research universities in his or her field of expertise. They appear alongside data on citations per published paper by researchers at each institution.

On October 28, we publish the main World 51¹ú²úÊÓƵ Rankings as a supplement in The Times Higher . It will assess the world's 200 top universities using criteria such as peer review, research citations, international attractiveness to staff and students, and staff-to-student ratios. This year's rankings will include new data on top employers' opinions of universities.

The rankings are compiled by Martin Ince ( martin@martinince.com ), contributing editor of The Times Higher . The data was co-ordinated by QS Quacquarelli Symonds ( ); the citations data was supplied by Evidence Ltd ( ) from information collected by Thomson Scientific ( ). It is derived from Thomson's Essential Science Indicators database for 1995 to 2005.