Methodology
Moscow International University Ranking "The Three University Missions"
About
The first draft methodology for the Moscow International University Ranking was formed following a large-scale public discussion, in which over 100 organizations took part - universities, councils of rectors, expert associations and rating agencies. The list of rating criteria was submitted for consideration to the International Expert Council of the rating, which includes 25 reputable experts in the field of higher education, representing the USA, Great Britain, Brazil, China, India, South Africa, Iran, Italy, Belgium, Turkey, Poland and Russia.
After the pilot version of the rating was released in December 2017, consultations with experts continued. Based on feedback, some ranking indicators were adjusted, and the list of universities participating in the ranking was expanded to 500 universities. In 2019, more than 1,700 were shortlisted, in 2020 - more than 1,800, in 2021 - more than 2,000, in 2022 - more than 2,200, and in 2023 - more than 2,300 universities representing 165 countries and territories .
The basis for the short list of the Moscow International University Ranking in 2023 was the short list of the 2022 ranking, which included about 2,200 universities. The number of universities representing a country was determined in proportion to the country's contribution to the world economy. The list includes universities that occupy leading positions in global academic rankings and/or leading in national rankings from the IREG Inventory of National Rankings list. In a number of cases, the selection was made based on the number of scientific publications of the university for the period 2017-2020. At the same time, narrow-profile universities were excluded from consideration, that is, those that do not have educational programs in at least two of the six fields of knowledge according to the OECD classification, and universities that do not have bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. programs. (postgraduate studies) or their equivalents. Subsequently, universities with fewer than 500 students were excluded from the shortlist.
A number of changes were made to the rating methodology in 2023, which affected mainly the sources used, due to the fact that some of them were no longer available or had lost their relevance. The Green Brain of the Year Contest, McGill Management International Case Competition and LafargeHolcim Awards were excluded from the list of Olympiads used to calculate the criterion “Number of victories of university students at international student Olympiads”. YouTube and Telegram have been added to the list of social networks used to calculate the criterion “Number of subscribers to a university account on social networks”. Due to the discontinuation of the Alexa.com tool, data from the operator Similarweb.com was used to calculate the criterion “Size of the Internet audience of a university website.”
To compile the rating, only objective criteria approved by international experts were used; Reputation surveys are completely excluded. The sources of information were open data from official websites of universities and national authorities, as well as data from independent international sources: the largest aggregator of online course platforms Class Central; mass education platforms “Open Education” (Russia) and icourse163.org (China); public multilingual universal encyclopedia "Wikipedia"; search engines Google, Yandex, Baidu; social networks Facebook*, X (formerly Twitter**), VK, Sina Weibo, YouTube, Telegram; Similarweb company, one of the world leaders in the field of web analytics; websites of international student olympiads; bibliometric data providers; websites of academic awards from the IREG List of International Academic Awards.