Each year, Clarivate publishes a list of the most highly cited university academics in the world. So, you can see exactly which of the UK’s Russell Group unis have the cleverest lecturers in 2025.
For Clarivate to rate an academic as “highly cited”, lots of their work needs to be in the top 1 per cent of papers which researchers most reference. Only 7,131 uni academics in the world are highly cited. They’re in the brainiest 0.01 per cent of academics.
Unsurprisingly, the Russell Group uni with the cleverest lectures in 2025 is the University of Oxford. What a shock. A huge 68 highly cited academics work there. Amazingly, University College London (UCL) has more of these top tier lecturers than the University of Cambridge does. UCL only has one fewer highly cited researcher than Oxford. It probably helps that UCL is one of the largest Russell Group unis.
At the other end, the Russell Group uni with the least top tier lecturers is York. The uni only has one highly cited academic on their pay roll. Congrats to Professor Simon Gilbody from the department of health sciences.
So, here are the Russell Group unis with the cleverest lecturers in 2025, based on how many staff are highly cited:
24. University of York – one academic
23. University of Warwick – three academics
22. Cardiff University – four academics
=18. London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) – five academics
=18. Newcastle University – five academics
Newcastle might be better for pubs than for publishing academic papers
=18. Queen Mary University of London – five academics
=18. University of Sheffield – five academics
=16. Durham University – six academics
=16. University of Liverpool – six academics
15. University of Leeds – seven academics
=13. University of Southampton – eight academics
=13. Queen’s University Belfast – eight academics
12. University of Birmingham – nine academics
11. University of Nottingham – 12 academics
10. University of Manchester – 13 academics
9. University of Glasgow – 14 academics
Glasgow Uni campus is such a vibe
8. King’s College London (KCL) – 23 academics
7. University of Exeter – 24 academics
6. University of Bristol – 25 academics
5. University of Edinburgh – 33 academics
4. Imperial College London – 48 academics
3. University of Cambridge – 61 academics
2. University College London (UCL) – 67 academics
1. University of Oxford – 68 academics
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