Commonly known as the Shanghai Ranking, the list has been compiled annually by China's Jiao Tong University since 2003 to provide a reference for the academic standings of 500 universities around the world.
Like last year, no Spanish university was considered good enough to make the top 200, according to national daily 20 Minutos.
The four best were considered to be the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the Autonomous University of Madrid, Complutense University of Madrid and the University of Barcelona.
Topping the overall chart were Harvard, Stanford, MIT (Massachussets Institute of Technology) and Cambridge.
The Shanghai Ranking rates universities according to a formula based on the number of articles they have published in prestigious academic journals, the number of highly-cited researchers working there, the number of Nobel Prizes or Fields Medals (in mathematics) won and the per-capita academic performance of each institution.
It is generally considered to be one of the top three most widely consulted and influential international university rankings.
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