St Petersburg University improves its position in the international Webometrics Ranking

The Webometrics Ranking of World Universities has been published since 2004. It evaluates universities according to different indicators of their web presence. Results are published twice a year: in January and July. Every year the number of universities evaluated is growing. Five years ago, there were about 24,000; this year the ranking compilers have already evaluated more than 31,000 world universities. Only a third of them have made the final list of the best — about 11,000.

The current version of the Webometrics Ranking evaluates universities according to three main criteria: Visibility — the number of external networks (subnets) linking to the institution’s webpages; Transparency (or Openness) — the number of citations from Top 210 authors (excluding top 20 outliers); Excellence (or Scholar) — the number of papers amongst the top 10% most cited in each one of the all 27 disciplines of the full database.

St Petersburg University shows steady growth in the ranking every year. So, if in 2010 the University was ranked only 1058th, then five years later it had moved up to 544th place. In 2016, St Petersburg University improved its position by almost 100 points and was ranked 452nd. In July 2020, the University was 437th, and by January 2021 it had moved up by 58 positions and for the first time it was listed among the top 400 universities with its 379th place. This is the second best result among Russian universities.

St Petersburg University showed the most significant growth in terms of the Openness indicator, having moved up by 207 points in six months. According to the Visibility indicator, the growth was 49 points.