World's top universities include 29 in Spain

Along with the UK and Spain, a further 75 countries are present on the list which, once again, is topped by Oxford, with Cambridge having leap-frogged the California Institute of Technology to snatch second place from it, climbing from fourth last year.

Once again, Spain's highest-ranked university is the Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona (pictured), at number 140, sandwiched between the British universities of Leeds (139) and Birmingham (joint 141 with that of Eindhoven, The Netherlands).

In fact, the Pompeu Fabra, or UPF, has shot up 25 places from last year's 165, and Barcelona Autonomous University (UAB) has gone from 163 in the previous ranking to 147 – a meteoric rise, but dropping below the UPF.

Now sharing a ranking with the University of Nottingham and the University of Sussex (UK), Spain's second-ranked higher education institution is just below that of Oslo and just above that of Lancaster.

Not to be confused with the UAB, Barcelona University maintains its joint position at 201 to 250, all of which are on equal footing and include Reading, Queen's in Belfast, the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, University College Dublin, and St George's University of London, and is above Bath, Essex, Surrey and Swansea, four of the institutions which share the 251 to 300 slot.

Sharing ranking 301 to 350 with Aberystwyth, Anglia Ruskin, Kent, Bangor, Loughborough, Stirling, Birkbeck University of London, Brighton & Sussex Medical School and Goldsmith's University of London is the University of Navarra in Pamplona.

Madrid Autonomous University (UAM) sits jointly in the 351 to 400 position with the UK's West Midlands-based Aston University, Brunel University of London, Heriot-Watt, London City, the Royal Veterinary College, and Cork (Ireland).

In the 401 to 500 bracket is the University of Catalunya, in Barcelona and the Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, which they share with Dublin City, Middlesex, Hull, Plymouth, Strathclyde, SOAS University of London, and the Open University.

From 501 to 600 is Madrid's Complutense University, Valencia, Granada and Valencia Polytechnic, rubbing shoulders with the Universities of Hertfordshire, Keele, Liverpool John Moore's, Limerick (Ireland), Ulster (Northern Ireland), West of Scotland, Northumbria and Portsmouth.

The University of Alcalá in Madrid is in the 601 to 800 list, along with the University of the Basque Country, the Carlos III University of Madrid, the King Juan Carlos, La Laguna, Jaén University, Murcia, Oviedo, Salamanca, Sevilla, Santiago de Compostela (Galicia), the Technical University of Madrid, Vigo (Galicia), and Zaragoza.

British universities in the same slot are Bedfordshire, South Wales, Bournemouth, Bradford, Brighton, Central Lancashire, Coventry, De Montfort, East London, Teesside, West of England, Lincoln, Manchester Metropolitan, Westminster, Edinburgh Napier, Glasgow Caledonian, Greenwich, Nottingham Trent, Roehampton, Salford, Huddersfield, Kingston, Leeds Beckett and, in Ireland, the Dublin Institute of Technology.

Finally, between 801 and 1,000 is the University of A Coruña (Galicia), Castilla-La Mancha, Alicante, and Almería.

They share this ranking with four UK universities - London South Bank, Derby, Robert Gordon and Sheffield Hallam.

According to the preamble for the coming year's league tables, the Times Higher Education list uses 13 performance indicators which cover the 'core missions' of teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.