Methodology
Moscow International University Ranking "The Three University Missions"
About
The first draft of the Moscow International University Ranking “The Three University Missions” (MosIUR) methodology was developed following a large-scale public discussion with over 100 collective contributors, such as universities, rector councils, expert associations, and rating agencies. The list of ranking criteria was submitted for consideration to the ranking’s International Expert Council, comprised of 25 renowned higher education experts from Belgium, Brazil, China, India, Iran, Italy, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Turkey, the UK, and the USA. Expert discussions continued after the release of the MosIUR pilot version, December 2017. Following the feedback, some ranking indicators were adjusted, and the shortlist of participating universities was expanded to 500. In 2019 the shortlist featured over 1700, in 2020 — over 1800, in 2021 — over 2000, and in 2022 — over 2200 higher education institutions (HEIs), representing 129 countries and territories.
The MosIUR 2022 shortlist was largely comprised of about 2000 HEIs shortlisted in 2021. The number of institutions representing any given country was meant to be proportional to the country’s contribution to the world economy. Universities with leading positions in global university rankings and/or national academic rankings listed in the IREG Inventory of National Rankings were included in the evaluation list. In some cases, the selection was based on the number of the university’s academic papers from 2017 to 2020 indexed by the Web of Science Core Collection citation database, according to data obtained by the analytical tool InCites. Furthermore, narrow-focused HEIs, i.e., those without educational programs in at least two out of six research areas according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) classification, and HEIs with no Bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD programs or their equivalents were excluded from consideration. Higher education institutions with a student body of less than 500 were excluded from the list as well.
The ranking uses exclusively objective indicators approved by international experts. Reputational surveys are excluded entirely. Information sources include open access data from official websites of universities and national authorities, as well as data obtained from independent international sources, such as: bibliometric data provider Clarivate Analytics; largest online course platform aggregator “Class Central”; mass education platforms Open Education (Russia) and icourse163. org (China); free content, multilingual online encyclopedia Wikipedia; search engines (Google, Yandex, Baidu); social networks (Facebook, Twitter, VK, Sina Weibo); Alexa — one of the world leaders in web-analytics; and international student competition websites and scientific awards from the IREG List of International Academic Awards.