OREANDA-NEWS. October 14, 2011. Although not in the Top 200 institutions yet, Estonia, Czech Republic, Poland, Turkey, Iran and India all show promise in the "Bubbling Under" Section Just Outside the Top 200. This puts UT in the top 3% of worlds best universities' list for the first time, reported the press-centre of UT.

The annual rankings, which are the most sophisticated and carefully calibrated rankings ever published, provide a definitive list of the world’s top 200 universities.
While the top 200 is dominated by US and British institutions, there are many countries with institutions that are ‘bubbling under’, sitting in bands just outside the elite 200. With higher scores in two or three areas they could see themselves in the top 200 in the coming years.
 
Estonia is one such country, with University of Tartu (placed in the 350-400 band), together with Czech Republic and Poland make up the Eastern European contingent in the "bubbling under" section. These institutions appear to be the most promising candidates to achieve world class status in the region.

The data, which are supplied by Thomson Reuters, judge universities on 13 performance indicators, making these the only world rankings to examine all core missions of a modern global university - research, teaching, knowledge transfer and international activity. They include the world’s largest academic reputation survey and an analysis of 50 million citations which are compared with the world average from the same field.
 
This year’s methodology has been slightly refined to ensure that universities with particular strength in the arts, humanities and social sciences are placed on a more equal footing with those with a speciality in science subjects, which in the past may have been given an artificial boost as they tend to attract more funding. Such sophisticated methodology has established the Times Higher Education World University Rankings as the most respected and citied rankings system amongst universities worldwide.
 
It is this levelling of the playing field that has led Oxford, with its arts bias, to move ahead of Cambridge, which is particularly known for its natural science faculties.