The United Kingdom has emerged as the world leader in terms of outward-looking universities, according to rankings released by the Times Higher Education (THE) supplement.

Imperial College London was placed tenth in the list of 200 institutions worldwide, heading up an impressive contingent of eight British universities in the top 25, which also included Oxford, UCL, KCL, LSE, Queen Mary and Queen’s University Belfast.

UK universities took nearly two thirds of all places, the University of Cambridge coming in as the world’s thirty-sixth – and the UK’s thirteenth – most international university. The rankings were based on the THE’s most recent “international outlook” data, which is calculated by how good a university is at attracting students and staff from abroad – measured by the ratio of international-to-domestic students and staff, as well how much “international collaboration” is undertaken at an institution.

To determine “international collaboration”, the THE “calculate the proportion of a university’s total research journal publications that have at least one international co-author”.

The top three most outward-looking universities according to these latest rankings are Qatar University, the University of Luxembourg and the University of Hong Kong.

Interestingly, none of these – and only two of the top ten – comprise the top ten of THE’s broader scoped World University Rankings. The California Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago, respectively first and tenth in the broader rankings, both fail to make the top 200 in terms of international outlook.