<p>Constructing a group of world-class universities is an important strategic deployment to enhance China’s scientific and technological innovation capabilities. Chinese universities have performed remarkably well in the four authoritative world university ranking lists. For example, in the latest ARWU rankings, 191 Chinese universities made the list, on par with the USA. Does the rapidly rising ranking reflect the good research efficiency of China’s elite universities? This study evaluates and compares the differences in research efficiency between elite universities in China and the UK. And we go a further step to examine how Chinese and UK elite universities use antecedent conditions in different ways to achieve a high level of research efficiency. In this study, we provide one of the few attempts to conduct a two-stage analysis by combining the meta-frontier SBM model with a configuration approach panel fsQCA. Findings show that under a common frontier, the average meta-frontier efficiencies of Chinese elite universities are relatively higher than those of the UK group. However, elite universities in the UK are particularly strong at publishing high-quality outputs. In configuration analysis, we find that there are one and four paths related to achieving a high level of research efficiency in the Chinese and UK groups, respectively.</p>