A total of 35 Chinese universities rank among the world's 500 best in a ranking released by China's Shanghai Jiao Tong University on Monday.

Among the 35 universities, 23 are based on the Chinese mainland, almost triple the number when the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) was first compiled and released in 2003.

The ranking puts Harvard University on the top of the list, followed by Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Cambridge, Caltech, Princeton, Columbia, Chicago and Oxford.

National Taiwan University, Chinese University of Hong Kong and Tsinghua University are the top three Chinese universities and also entered the Top 200 worldwide.

Six other Chinese mainland universities rank among the Top 300.

Shanghai Jiao Tong University itself ranks in the top five of mainland universities after Tsinghua University and Peking University.

Two Chinese mainland universities, Beihang University (formerly known as Beijing University of Aeronautics & Astronautics) and Beijing Normal University, rank among the Top 500 for the first time.

ARWU has been presenting the world's top 500 universities annually since 2003 based on a set of indicators and third-party data.

ARWU uses six indicators to rank world universities such as the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, the number of highly cited researchers selected by Thomson Scientific, and the number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science.

More than 1,000 universities are evaluated, and the best 500 are published by ARWU, which has been recognized as a trustworthy precursor of global university rankings.

Chinese universities have performed well in categories such as the number of articles published in international journals, but still lags behind the global top 100 in terms of internationally recognized intellectual masters and articles of world influence, ARWU said in a press release.

Shanghai Jiao Tong University is considered one of China's first-class universities based on its reputation in engineering and science and is best known for its most renowned graduate, former president Jiang Zemin, who graduated from the electrical machinery department in 1947.