Universities in the United States, Canada and England earned top honors in Sichuan University's 2015 ranking of the world's top 200 universities in innovation.

The top 10 universities were Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of Toronto, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Michigan, University College London, University of Oxford, the University of Washington and the University of Pennsylvania.

The ranking, released on Wednesday, was determined by the Chengdu-based university's Scientific and Technological Competitiveness Ranking of Global University Institute. It was based on the number of theses published in world-class academic journals, such as Nature and Science, and the school's volume of international patents.

Eighteen universities from the Chinese mainland appeared on the list. Nine were ranked in the top 100: Tsinghua University (13), Peking University (22), Zhejiang University (26), Shanghai Jiaotong University (31), the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (46), Fudan University (56), Nanjing University (77), Sun Yat-sen University (80) and Sichuan University (95).

The rankings were determined by data collected from October 2014 to September 2015.