In the modern world, thousands of universities offer their educational services to millions of students. As a rule, when choosing a university, applicants and their parents rely on international university rakings. Nowadays, ratings have become significant tools for competition between universities.
The research of successful practices of promoting universities in international rankings shows that a whole range of work has to be carried out on a regular basis. It cannot be done in a short period.
Now we are going to tell you about popular Webometrics Ranking methodology and the calculation of its indicators.
It is a ranking system for the world's universities published by an independent Spanish research group Cybermetrics Lab covering more than 28,000 Higher Education Institutions worldwide. The Ranking Web is based on a composite indicator that consists of both the citation of scientific publications and presence of universities on the Internet. Data is collected twice a year: in January and in July.
In updated version of Webometrics Ranking of World Universities (WRWU) BNTU has risen 183 places, was ranked 2661 in the world and got the second place among Belarusian universities, made it 2nd after BSU. Moreover, we have climbed 300 places compared to January 2018 and have risen almost 400 places compared to July 2017. Each and every place is taken by a university which tries to keep up with global trends, just like we do.
The top five universities in the country are the following: the 1st place - BSU (703); 2nd place Belarusian National Technical University (2661), the 3rd – Yanka Kupala State University of Grodno (3373); the 4th - BSUIR (3804); the 5th – Francisk Skorina Gomel State University (3848).
Assessment criteria changes every six months, therefore, it is impossible to develop one strategy to increase the ranking of a university. The current methodology contains four main indicators: presence, visibility, transparency, excellence.
How have they been formed?
Presence is defined by number of unique pages of the webdomain of a university and all its subdomains based on Ahrefs system data. Among Belarusian universities BNTU has the first position on this indicator (BNTU – 466th place; BSU – 649th place), it has risen 202 places in comparison with the last 6 months.
Visibility – number of external networks linking to the institution's webpages, namely references to a university on other Internet resources. Weight of a criterion is 50%. BNTU has risen 421 places on Visibility indicator what is a significant growth.
Transparency (or openness) – number of citations from top 100 authors of a university excluding 5 outliers. Weight of a criterion is 10%. Increase in the criterion was 175 places.
Excellence (or scholar) – top 10% most cited papers in respective field of science for the period 2013–2017 according to abstract and citation database Scopus (SCImago Journal Rank). Weight of a criterion is 35%. Here we had better intensify our research activities, pay more attention to publications in rating scientific literature, to work further on BNTU scientific and technical journals so that they are included in the Scopus database. It will result in improvement of the Excellence indicator, that in the latest publication decreased by 2% (or 70 places).
We thank all the professors and students for their hard work and their contribution to development of the scientific potential of our university. We also wanted to thank all our readers.
We wanted to express our gratitude to the director of the BNTU Scientific Library Inna Yurik, who helped us to write this article
Перевела Лахцутко Полина, студент БНТУ – ФТУГ
