Five Australian universities have fallen from their rankings among the top universities in 100 World Reputation Rankings published by The Times.

Only the University of Melbourne made it to the top 50 for 2014 ranking.

The University of Sydney and the Australian National University did not make it into the top 50 as compared to last year rankings. They do, however, remain among the top 100.

The University of Queensland and University of New South Wales made it into the top 100, but the Monash University was removed from the list totally.

Editor Phil Baty concluded that the $2.8 billion budget cut to Australia's tertiary sector might have contributed to the fall of the five universities.

"We can't read their minds but we've been speculating that the funding cuts announced by the former government, unprecedented cuts, sent some very negative messages out there into the world," he said.

University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Glyn Davis agreed to Mr Baty's conclusion.

"They are pretty powerful signals that Australia, already a very low investor of public money in higher education, is going to invest even less and people read this. That money is coming out of our system, it means there are less researchers than there were, less researchers supported and that has consequences. One of the distressing things is how long those consequences tend to linger. Once you're seen as no longer performing to a global standard, it's very hard to win back the standing that you once had," Mr Davis told ABC.

In order to come up with its list of top universities for 2014, The Times conducted a survey between March and May 2013. The survey received 10,536 responses from 133 countries.

Twenty-two per cent of the respondents during the survey were practitioners in social science, engineering and technology; 18 per cent in physical sciences; 16 per cent in clinical subjects; 13 per cent in life sciences; and 9 per cent in the arts and humanities.

These practitioners were invited across different regions. Twenty-five per cent of the respondents came from North America, 19 per cent from Western Europe, 13 per cent from East Asia, 10 per cent from Oceania, 10 per cent from Eastern Europe, 5 per cent from the Middle East and 4 per cent from South America.

The respondents were particularly instructed to name no more than 15 of those they believe to be the best, based on their own experience.

They were asked "action-based" questions, i.e. "Which university would you send your most talented graduates to for the best postgraduate supervision?"