Number of citations by other scientific publications might be a strong objective standard though but only if you cover recent years (because then older institutions would get an advantage). My reasoning is that if it was used by another scientific paper than its predicate either formed the reasoning for the new paper or bolstered the results, unless there was a contradiction addressed but those would have to be weeded out.
I mean it’s pretty silly to rank ‘top’ by the metric of ‘number of scientific publications’.
The Chinese institutions listed here aren’t even the ones considered ‘top’ by Chinese people by normal standards.
Number of citations by other scientific publications might be a strong objective standard though but only if you cover recent years (because then older institutions would get an advantage). My reasoning is that if it was used by another scientific paper than its predicate either formed the reasoning for the new paper or bolstered the results, unless there was a contradiction addressed but those would have to be weeded out.