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An evaluation by AllAboutUni.com found that Scotland has the highest density of World's Top-500 universities in the United Kingdom. AllAboutUni.com is an independent, comprehensive and interactive website where visitors can obtain information about universities (global rankings, student feedback, news and photos of the University campus).

The academic ranking of world universities (ARWU) is produced by the Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Several indicators of academic or research are used to rank, they include highly cited researchers, articles indexed in major citation indices and staff winning Nobel prizes.

The World's Top-500 universities (2008) are mainly located in Europe (n = 210, 40%), Americas (n = 190, 40%) and the Asia / Pacific (n = 100, 20%). There are 42 (8%) universities in the United Kingdom (UK), representing 20% of universities in Europe.

The top 10 universities in the United Kingdom are as follows: University of Cambridge (4th in the world), the University of Oxford (10th), University College London (22nd), Imperial College London (27), the University of Manchester (40th), University of Edinburgh (55th), University of Bristol (61st), University of Sheffield (77th), King's College London (81st) and the University of Nottingham (82).

The United Kingdom has the largest number of universities in the world top-500 universities (42) compared to other European countries: Germany (40), France (23), Italy (22), the Netherlands (12), Sweden (11) and Spain (9). In the ranking of Europe's top 10 universities, five are located in the United Kingdom and in the top 25 universities, nine are located in the United Kingdom.

UK universities are located in the following regions: England (34), Scotland (5), Wales (2) and Northern Ireland (1). One interesting difference is that universities in Scotland are much older than the other three regions: the median age for Scottish universities is 513 years (127-598), compared to 101 years (39-912) in England and 107 years (range 88-125) in Wales.

To make a comparison with other industrialized countries, AllAboutUni.com calculates the number of universities in the world Top-500 (2008) per million inhabitants. The total number of universities per million inhabitants in industrialized countries is 0.5. A previous evaluation showed that small countries in Western Europe (Sweden (1.2), Finland (1.1) and Switzerland (1.0)) and New Zealand (1.2) are most Many universities per million inhabitants.

The number of universities in the world top-500 universities located in the United Kingdom is 0.7 per million inhabitants, which compares favorably with other major industrialized countries: Canada (0.6) Germany (0.5), the United States (0.5), France (0.4), Italy (0.4) and Japan (0.2). For the four regions of the United Kingdom, the figures are as follows: Scotland (1.0), Britain (0.7), Wales (0.7) and Northern Ireland (0, 6).

Conclusions
In the United Kingdom, Scotland has a much higher density of the best universities in relation to England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scotland also performs very well compared to other industrialized countries and the number of Scottish universities per million inhabitants is one of the highest in the world.