The University of Toledo held on to its middle-of-the-pack place in an international ranking of universities released Wednesday.

UT ranked in the 501 to 600 range among what London-based website Times Higher Education considers the world’s 980 top universities from 79 countries. The schools listed in the 13th edition of the World University Rankings represent 5 percent of higher education institutions, according to the site.

Toledo first submitted data to the publication last year, when it also was listed in the 501 to 600 range out of 801 schools.

“More and more, these universities are global competitors,” rankings editor Phil Baty said. “Toledo might see itself as a regional university, but it is a global player. It is a global phenomenon.”

The rankings are used by international students searching for the right university to attend and by government and university leaders who study the results, he said.

Leaders at UT want to boost the school’s reputation, which makes this recognition important, said Frank Calzonetti, vice president of research.

“The community of scholars, it’s an international community, so faculty members do interact with faculty around the world. Students now are very adept at looking globally for the best fit for them,” he said. “We want to grow the research enterprise, which is reflected here.”

Last week, U.S. News & World Report released its rankings, in which UT again went unranked among 310 national universities with a placement in the second tier, or bottom 25 percent. That list is more heavily weighted toward undergraduate studies, officials said.

Times Higher Education’s No. 1 honor went to the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, marking the first time since the ranking’s 2004 inception that a U.S. university was not in the top spot. California Institute of Technology, last year’s top performer, fell to No. 2.

Stanford University came in third followed by University of Cambridge; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Harvard University; Princeton University; Imperial College London; ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology; University of California, Berkeley; and University of Chicago.

The University of Michigan remained at No. 21. Ohio State University, tied for 90th last year, tied for 72 this year.

Michigan State University is No. 101, Case Western Reserve University is No. 126, University of Cincinnati is in the 201 to 250 range, Wayne State University is in the 351 to 400 range, Kent State University is in the 401 to 500 range, and Miami University and Ohio University are in the 601 to 800 range.

Bowling Green State University did not submit data because it had reservations about the methodology, spokesman Dave Kielmeyer said. The university is reviewing how schools are evaluated and will consider participating in the future, he said.

The publication provides a range instead of a specific rank for schools that fall lower on the list because differences between those institutions are not as clear as for schools at the top, Mr. Baty said.

The publication uses 13 performance indicators to compare institutions. The measures include a reputational survey, international student numbers, and ways to gauge research levels, such as the number of faculty citations in academic journals.

The number of international students is a small component of the overall score, but universities are increasingly looking to recruit overseas students who bring tuition dollars to help support the institution, Mr. Baty said.

Enrollment numbers used to calculate the just-released rankings are from the fall of 2014 and include 1,693 international students from other countries studying at UT on student visas, UT spokesman Meghan Cunningham said. UT’s total head count that year was 20,626 students.

Ohio State has seen its world rank swing from as high as 53 to as low as 129, said to Julia Carpenter-Hubin, assistant vice president of institutional research and planning.

“Such large changes are not uncommon with this ranking and are difficult to account for,” she said in a written statement. “We recommend readers take into account a ranking’s volatility, along with who publishes the ranking and what specific attributes they prioritize.”

The United States had 148 institutions in the top 980 schools on this year’s list. The United Kingdom followed with 91 schools. In Asia, 290 universities from 24 countries made the rankings.

A full list of the World University Rankings can be found online at timeshighereducation.com.

Contact Vanessa McCray at: vmccray@theblade.com or 419-724-6065, or on Twitter @vanmccray.

First Published September 22, 2016, 4:00 a.m.