Following the clean sweep of victories over Oxford at the boat races last month, Cambridge has continued to triumph over their rivals as newly published university rankings placed Cambridge as the top UK university in the majority of five broad subject categories.

The QS World University Rankings ranked Cambridge above Oxford - and any other UK university - in Arts and Humanities, Engineering and Technology and Natural Sciences. Oxford students can take some respite after being crowned as the highest placed UK university in Life Sciences and Medicine and Social Sciences and Management.

Globally, Cambridge took second place in Arts and Humanities, third in Engineering and Technology and third in Natural Sciences. Cambridge also ranked sixth in Life Sciences and Medicine and sixth in Social Sciences and Management.

While American giants Harvard, MIT and Stanford topped many of the lists in this year’s rankings, Cambridge notably ranked first in the world for individual subjects, including Archaeology and Modern Languages, moving up from second place last year and overtaking Oxford.

Cambridge was also ranked the top UK university to study mathematics - taking the number two spot globally - marketing and statistics, linguistics and chemical, civil, electrical and mechanical engineering. For law and medicine, Cambridge ranked 3rd and 4th in the world respectively.

London universities also performed well, with Imperial College appearing in the top ten for Engineering and Technology, Natural Sciences and Life Sciences and Medicine - being joined by UCL in the latter category. 

Oxford took second place globally for the categories of Life Sciences and Medicine and Social Sciences and Management, and narrowly outperformed Cambridge by one spot in some subjects including history and law.

The rankings, which claim to be “the most widely-read university rankings in the world”, are published annually and consider 1,500 higher education institutions around the world and rank 54 individual subjects in 5 broad subject categories.