Hebrew U. places number 82 on the list, which is headed by Harvard, Stanford and Yale. It is the only university in the Middle East to be included on the list.

Newsweek said its study took into account "openness and diversity, as well as distinction in research."

A separate ranking of the world’s top 500 universities published earlier this year by China’s Shanghai Jiaotong University ranked Hebrew University in 60th place. The Chinese report rated the university in 78th place the previous year. Also placing on the report were Haifa’s Technion (115), Tel Aviv University (116), Rehovot’s Weizmann Institute (151), Bar Ilan University (303), Ben Gurion University (304) and the University of Haifa (467).

Newsweek based half of its score on the three criteria used by Shanghai Jiaotong: the number of highly-cited researchers in various academic fields, the number of articles published in Nature and Science magazines, and the number of articles listed in the ISI Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities indices.

Another 40% of the score used the four criteria that the Times of London ranking system used: the percentage of international faculty, the percentage of international students, citations per faculty member and the ratio of faculty to students.

The last 10% was based on the number of volumes in the universities' libraries.

Founded by Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Martin Buber, and Chaim Weizmann, among others, Hebrew University has a reputation for its studies in the sciences and religion, housing the world's largest Jewish studies collection. Recent Nobel Prize Laureate Robert Aumann is a professor at the university.