LONDON -- Some 88 Chinese universities are included in the Global 400 subjects in the latest QS World University Rankings by Subject, which was released Tuesday by QS Quacquarelli Symonds, a higher education research firm.

This makes China the country with the second most number of universities included in the Global 400 Subjects, according to the QS rankings. This is only after the United States, which has 164 universities included in the Global 400 subjects. The UK comes third at 78 universities.

China's best performances by subject this year come from Tsinghua University, with three top-10 places, and Peking University, with two top-10 places. Tsinghua University finishes eighth in both Architecture/Built Environment and in Engineering (Civil and Structural). Peking University also manages an equally lofty finish, coming eighth in Modern Languages; it also lies joint 10th for Linguistics. Tsinghua comes in 10th place in the world's Materials Science subject rankings.

This is the sixth edition of the QS World University Rankings by Subject, featuring a record-breaking 42 disciplines, making it the largest-ever ranking of the kind. The expert opinion of the world's top 76,798 academics and 44,426 employers informed the results, alongside the analysis of 28.5 million research papers and over 113 million citations sourced from the Scopus/Elsevier bibliometric database, said QS.