On Oct. 29, 2025, the CWTS Leiden ranking show that Harvard University dropped to third place in the recent CWTS Leiden Ranking, a significant shift from its former dominance, as Chinese universities like Zhejiang University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University moved ahead, reflecting a global trend of increasing Chinese research output and U.S. institutions losing ground in research volume and citation impact metrics.

The top ten rankings are dominated by Chinese Universities with Harvard, the only U.S. Institution is ranked third, and University of Toronto ranked in tenth place. The University of Michigan and Johns Hopkins University were ranked 20th and 23rd, respectively.

The traditional focus of the Leiden Ranking is on publications in international scientific journals, referred to as core publications in the Leiden Ranking.

To offer a more inclusive view on the academic system worldwide, the 2025 release of the Leiden Ranking Open Edition also considers publications in scientific venues with a national or regional focus, referred to as non-core publications.

The Traditional Edition and the Open Edition of the Leiden Ranking 2025 include 1594 and 2831 universities, respectively. While the Traditional Edition covers all universities with at least 800 core publications in the Web of Science database in the period 2020-2023, the Open Edition covers all universities with at least 1500 core and non-core publications in the OpenAlex database in the same period.