Both Trinity College Dublin and UCD have jumped up considerably in the Shanghai rankings, one of the most prestigious international league tables for higher education institutions.

TCD has broken into the top 200 - ranked in 170th position - having been placed in the top 201-300 bracket last year.

On a similar trajectory, UCD moved up from the 301-400 bracket last year to 254th place on the 2014 list.

The only other Irish university in the top 500 - UCC - dropped from the 301-400 bracket to 454th place.

With three universities on the list, Ireland was placed 24th in the international league table - sandwiched between Austria and Brazil. The USA led the global league table with 146 institutions in the top 500 - including table-toppers Harvard, Stanford and MIT - followed by the UK which had three universities in the top 20, and 38 in the top 500.

Officially called the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), the league table is better known by its directing institution the Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Trinity welcomed its move up the list, pointing to its similar standing in the two other big rankings QS and Times Higher Education.

UCD President Professor Andrew Deeks said its revised ranking reflected the growing reputation of the university's researchers internationally. "We have seen that, in terms of research impact, our citation levels are increasing as academics around the world use the findings of our scholars to further their own work."

He noted two UCD researchers had, for example, been recently ranked among the top 1 per cent of citations among 21 broad subject categories: Professor Des Higgins for his work on developing new bioinformatics and statistical tools for biology and medicine and Professor Colm O'Donnell for his biosystems engineering research in the area of food processing technologies.