Dear all, this is somewhat off-topic, but given the audience of this mailling list this might interest some people here. I have imported under R the data used in 2004 by Liu et al. from Shanghai Jiao Tong University to build their "Academic Ranking of World Universities", see: ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2004/2004Main.htm The following R code: loadURL("pbil.univ-lyon1.fr/R/donnees/shangai.RData", mode = "wb") should import a dataframe called "shangai" in your workspace. If you are interested I have also a draft Sweave-generated document based on this dataframe, but all comments are in french. I would be interested by references of scientific articles about this ranking. Best, Jean Lobry -- Jean R. Lobry (lobry at biomserv.univ-lyon1.fr) Laboratoire BBE-CNRS-UMR-5558, Univ. C. Bernard - LYON I, 43 Bd 11/11/1918, F-69622 VILLEURBANNE CEDEX, FRANCE allo : +33 472 43 12 87 fax : +33 472 43 13 88 pbil.univ-lyon1.fr/members/lobry