ITMO University was ranked 542-nd in Ranking of Repositories, having moved up 204 positions in comparison to the last half-year period. This result also changed ITMO’s position in Russia-only rankings, now being second only to Ural Federal University.
The changes in the ranking indicators speak for themselves. For instance, the visibility indicator played an essential role in improving ITMO’s position. For this significant indicator that has to do with external inlinks and the number of their referred webdomains, ITMO moved up 333 positions. Another considerable improvement (+118 positions) was for the size indicator, which is based on the total number of web pages extracted from Google, including rich files. There was also a small improvement for the Scholar indicator (+4 positions), based on the total number of publications in Google Scholar.
There was an important change in the methodology of the rankings concerning the rich files indicator, which was substituted by a social indicator. Instead of looking for the number of pdf files that mention the University, the new sources now include Academia, Bibsonomy, CiteUlike, CrossRef, Datadryad, Delicious, Facebook, Figshare, Google+, GitHub, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, RenRen, ResearchGate, Scribd, SlideShare, Tumblr, Twitter, Vimeo, VK, Weibo and others. There was a drop in ITMO’s ranking for this indicator – thankfully, not a significant one, - notes Ms. Irina Popova, head of Department of Informational Technologies.
The Top Universities based on the Google Scholar Citations sub ranking counts the citations of the university’s top ten authors in the Google Scholar system. It is yet to be included into the Webometrics overall ranking and is currently in a testing phase – almost a million scientists are registered on Google Scholar, as well as about 5,000 universities. According to this ranking, ITMO is in Russia’s top three, along with M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University and Saint Petersburg State University.
The full edition of the rankings is scheduled for early August, as the number of educational institutions listed in the ranking has increased.
The Webometrics ranking system was established in 2004 and is one of the most reputable web-rankings for educational establishments. The ranking’s methodology is based on analyzing the university’s presence in the global information space and implicitly assesses its educational and scientific achievements. The aim of the project is to assist universities to publish their scientific achievements and bring them to the general public. Webometrics indicators influence the university’s position in such important rankings as Times Higher Education World University Rankings and QS, thus, the development of a university’s web presence is one of the essential tasks for any university participating in Project 5-100.