#nyt# Data compiled by our teams at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute suggests that U.S. universities trail their Chinese counterparts in cutting-edge research in dozens of emerging technologies. We have combed through millions of scientific papers indexed on Web of Science, one of the world's most comprehensive databases of peer-reviewed studies, to identify the most influential and high-impact research. We've then used that data to rank universities around the world in 64 critical technologies.

Our findings are striking.

China takes the No. 1 spot globally in 57 of those fields. In most of them, Chinese schools don't just take the top slot; they dominate the top 10.

By these metrics, the world's best school for research based on aggregate performance across all technologies is Tsinghua University in Beijing, which ranks in the global top 10 in 29 of the 64 domains. In three of them - artificial intelligence algorithms and hardware accelerators, adversarial A.I. and autonomous systems operations - Tsinghua is No. 1 in the world. America's best performer, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, makes the top 10 in just 10 areas of research and ranks first in two of them.

We found that nine out of the 10 best overall performers are Chinese universities. That's not even factoring in nonuniversity institutions like the state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences, which, if included, would be the world's top performer, placing first in 28 of the 64 disciplines.

Data based on published scientific papers can't tell the whole story, of course. Chinese universities still don't provide the sort of well-rounded education across a diverse range of disciplines that keeps U.S. universities like Harvard and Yale high on most global rankings.