Subject Strength of 19 Chinese Universities: GRAS 2026, ARWU Indicators and Highly Cited Researchers 2025

Scope

16 mainland universities in the ARWU 2026 top 100 plus 3 in Hong Kong (HKU and CityUHK are in the top 100, CUHK is kept as a reference).

Codebook

data.csv, 1,083 rows. Unique key: university_id + subject_code.

Table 1. Columns of data.csv.

china_hk_in_top10.csv, 220 rows. Unique key: subject_code + university_slug.

Table 2. Columns of china_hk_in_top10.csv.

subject_profile.csv, 19 rows. Unique key: university_id.

Table 3. Columns of subject_profile.csv.

top10_by_subject_region.csv, 57 rows. Unique key: subject.

Table 4. Columns of top10_by_subject_region.csv.

arwu_indicators_by_region.csv, 36 rows. Unique key: year + arwu_region.

Table 5. Columns of arwu_indicators_by_region.csv.

arwu_tsinghua_indicators.csv, 17 rows. Unique key: year.

Table 6. Columns of arwu_tsinghua_indicators.csv.

hcr_by_university_category.csv, 16 rows. Unique key: university_id.

Table 7. Columns of hcr_by_university_category.csv.

hcr_by_region_category.csv, 84 rows. Unique key: hcr_region + category.

Table 8. Columns of hcr_by_region_category.csv.

sources.csv, 59 rows. Unique key: source_id. One row per distinct URL in the columns whose name ends in source_url: source_id, url, title (publisher and host), source_type, accessed_at (latest date a row citing it was checked), used_for (file, column and number of rows).

Method

Data for 13 mainland and 3 Hong Kong universities were collected between 9 and 23 October 2026 from official pages of the universities (admission and international-office pages, fee tables, catalogues), governments, embassies and visa centres, ranking publishers and, for stable facts only, secondary sources; a second verification pass on 23 October 2026 re-read the rows with gaps. An independent re-check of 69 random rows against the source found 64 matching; the 5 differences were corrected or given a lower confidence before release. The three universities that entered the ARWU top 100 in 2026 (Southeast University, Harbin Institute of Technology, Tianjin University) were collected on 8 November 2026 into the same columns; an independent re-check of 20 random rows of that collection found no difference: 8 matching, 6 matching on a secondary or previous-cycle page (marked partial), 6 whose page could not be opened automatically. A second check of 20 other random rows of the three universities, read in a browser on the same day, found 15 matching, 1 matching in part, 1 whose page is no longer online and 3 differences (Southeast University's 2027 admission brochure had replaced the 2025 language and calendar rules; Tianjin University names A-Level results in its scholarship notice); the 3 were corrected before release.

Every row carries source_url (the page the figure was read from) and checked_at (date read).

Text added by the second verification pass starts with "Updated 2026-10-23:". Ids follow the other Long Bet datasets (university_id slugs).

GRAS 2026 places were read from the ShanghaiRanking public ranking API, one call per subject (source_url gives the subject page). Only places of the 19 universities and derived counts are published here; the full subject lists remain the work of ShanghaiRanking and are not copied. A university missing from a subject list gets not in published list (top N), where N is how far ShanghaiRanking publishes that list. ARWU indicator means (arwu_indicators_by_region.csv) average the six indicator scores of the top-100 universities of each group in editions 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2022, 2025 and 2026, read from the ShanghaiRanking API (https://www.shanghairanking.com/api/pub/v1/arwu/rank?version=<year>). Highly Cited Researchers 2025 counts were read from the Clarivate list with its institution, region and category filters, all name variants of each university together and duplicates removed; one entry is one researcher in one category. hcr_by_university_category.csv covers the 16 universities of the first release (13 mainland, 3 in Hong Kong); Southeast University, Harbin Institute of Technology and Tianjin University, added with the ARWU 2026 base, were not counted. No researcher names are published.

Known limitations

• GRAS publishes subject lists to different depths (50 to 500 places), so "not in list" means different things per subject; read published_list_length.
• Rankings count research output; they say little about undergraduate teaching.
• Highly Cited Researchers are assigned to institutions by Clarivate; researchers with several affiliations are counted under the institution filter that lists them. The three universities added with the ARWU 2026 base have no per-university count yet.
• Ranking data are the work of ShanghaiRanking Consultancy and Clarivate; only extracts and derived counts are here.

How to verify

Open the source_url of a row and compare with checked_at. Rankings change once a year. Every URL is listed once in sources.csv.

Cite this
Atamanova, M. (2026). Subject Strength of 19 Chinese Universities: GRAS 2026, ARWU Indicators and Highly Cited Researchers 2025 [Data set]. https://mariascales.com/research/long-bet/data/china-subject-strength/

License

CC BY 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) for this compilation: free to share and adapt with attribution, see Cite this.

Ranking data are the work of ShanghaiRanking Consultancy (ARWU, GRAS); researcher counts derive from Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers 2025.