Jon Driver was pleased Thursday when he heard Simon Fraser University had ranked first in the comprehensive category of the annual Maclean's magazine university rankings, but he still took the news with a grain of salt.

"I think one has to be very careful about any ranking system. Universities are complex places with many, many different strengths," said Driver, vice-president (academic) at the Burnaby, B.C. institution. "Rankings systems provide one view of what we're doing."

Another B.C. school, the University of Victoria, stood second in the comprehensive category, which ranks institutions that offer professional degrees and a wide range of undergraduate and graduate programs, and also conduct a significant amount of research.

For the fifth-year running, McGill University in Montreal nabbed the top spot in medical doctoral category. The University of Toronto ranked second, its same rank as last year.

Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., however, fell to third place from second place in 2008, when it tied with Toronto.

Institutions in the medical doctoral category have medical schools and a variety of PhD programs, and generally receive higher research grants than other schools.

McGill performs well year after year because of the high number of student and faculty award winners, its low student to faculty ratios and its high number of research grants, said Joe Chidley, editor of special projects for Maclean's.

"McGill does very well in all of those areas," he said. "They are No. 1 in student awards. They're No. 1 in research grants in the humanities."

The University of British Columbia and the University of Alberta maintained their 2008 rankings of fourth and fifth. Last in the medical doctoral category was the University of Manitoba, in the 15th spot.

In the primarily undergraduate category, East Coast schools dominated the rankings, with Mount Allison University in New Brunswick placing first and Acadia in Nova Scotia placing second.

The University of Northern British Columbia placed third.

St. Francis Xavier in Antigonish, N.S., and Wilfrid Laurier in Waterloo, Ont., tied for fourth. Bishop's University in Quebec ranked 11th and made a major jump up from its 17th place finish last year.

The director of university advancement at Bishop's said he isn't convinced the rankings provide an accurate picture of his university's strengths.

"When we were 17th last year, we certainly didn't believe that we were the 17th ranked university in the country on the primarily undergraduate level nor, to be frank, do we believe we're the 11th," said David McBride.

The rankings were more accurate before 2006, McBride said, when Maclean's factored in data provided by schools into their ranking.

Now, the university rankings in the three categories are generated using publicly available data from Statistics Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and others.

"Before the change in the ranking system in 2006, we were anywhere between No. 4 and No. 7, so I would say we're climbing in the right direction back to where we think we belong, which is in the top five primarily undergraduate universities in the country," McBride said.

McBride said he hopes potential students undertake comprehensive research that goes beyond the rankings before choosing a school.

The University of Ontario Institute of Technology was a 2009 addition to the primarily undergraduate category of the rankings. The Oshawa school, founded in 2003, was ranked 12 out of 22 universities.

"That's a pretty respectable showing for a young university," Chidley said.

The rankings don't include schools with less than 1,000 students or ones that have religious, military or other special missions.

Recently accredited universities like Vancouver Island University in B.C. and Mount Royal University in Alberta aren't ranked either, because the necessary data were not available.

Maclean's also publishes results from surveys distributed to universities to gain information such as average entrance grades, class sizes and student retention.

Some institutions do not return the surveys and are, therefore, left off of this section of results, Chidley said.

He said 20 or so institutions did not return surveys for this year's special issue.

According to the survey results, Dalhousie in Halifax leads the pack for attracting the highest number of out of province students in first year, with 50.3 per cent.

Mount Allison and Bishop's follow closely behind with 50 per cent and 49 per cent, respectively.

A full list of the annual rankings are listed in a special issue of the magazine available Thursday and a partial list is available on oncampus.macleans.ca/education/rankings.