Many rankings are very "Anglo-Saxon". Focus on very specific metrics as number of Nobel prizes the institute produced, number of Science and Nature papers, etc

Europe these days is pushing for much more open publishing models, away from the Elsevier and Springer power houses. This ideological choice probably affects their unis negatively in some lists.

Yes, very much PR.

But one can still extract interesting trends and see how the education landscape is evolving.

south_korea_ln

science

Are China’s universities really the best in the world?

I'm not in academia, but from the outside, my perception is that such rankings are all about pr and don't necessarily reflect reality. 

But it's not hard to imagine that many Western academic institutions have been bogged down for the last decade with concerns other than "doing the best research."