Only two Russian universities ahead of us

The Belarusian State University is now ranked 584th on the world list, 25 positions up from 609th in August 2015. In total, Webometrics measures parameters from over 22,000 higher education institutions. There are over 30,000 in the world.

Once again, the Belarusian State University is one of the top three CIS universities, yielding only to the Lomonosov Moscow State University (which is ranked 134th) and the Saint Petersburg State University (452nd). As far as universities located in capital cities in the neighbouring countries are concerned, the list includes the University of Warsaw (282), the Vilnius University (689), the University of Latvia (897), and the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (1023).

The Belarusian State University is the unrivalled leader in Belarus. The country’s second highest ranking university is the Yanka Kupala State University of Grodno (2091). It is followed by the Belarusian National Technical University (2504). The Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics (BSUIR) occupies 3043 position while the Belarusian State Technological University (3537) concludes Belarus’ top five.

The Webometrics Ranking of World Universities has been compiled for over ten years now by the Spanish research lab, Laboratorio de Internet. The ranking is updated twice annually, in January and July. Higher educational establishments are assessed using four parameters which characterise the level of scientific publications and the online presence of universities in the World Wide Web: ‘impact’ of the website, ‘presence’ (the size of the site), ‘openness’ (the number of files found by the Google Scholar search system) and ‘excellence’ (number of publications by the specific university’s personnel in the world’s top 10 percent according to Scopus.

The current ranking has named Harvard University, Stanford University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the world’s top three higher education institutions.