Los Angeles, California - UCLA placed second among public universities nationally and 12th among all universities globally in a prestigious international ranking.

The 2015 Academic Ranking of World Universities - compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and issued August 15 - uses several criteria to measure excellence. Among them: number of faculty and alumni who have won Nobel Prizes and Fields medals, quantity of faculty research citations, articles published in Science and Nature, and per-capita performance.

Besides UCLA, three University of California campuses placed in the top 20: Berkeley (fourth), the only U.S. public university ranked higher than UCLA; San Diego (14th), and San Francisco (18th).

The top 11 in order were Harvard University, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, UC Berkeley, University of Cambridge, Princeton University, California Institute of Technology, Columbia University, University of Chicago, University of Oxford and Yale University.

UCLA held the same positions last year.

Regardless of methodology, numerous rankings consistently place UCLA among the top universities in the nation and the world.

For example, UCLA placed 12th in the 2014 Times Higher Education World University Rankings, and second among public universities and 23rd overall in the 2014 edition of the closely watched U.S. News and World Report listing of the nation’s top colleges and universities. Last August, Washington Monthly named UCLA the top “affordable elite” university and fifth among national universities in contributions serving the public interest.