MOSCOW INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY RANKING The Three University Missions Moscow September 2019 The Three University Missions Moscow International University Ranking 2019 Contents Key Facts....................................................................................................................................................2 Ranking Methodological Approaches.............................................................................................4 Rating Criteria.................................................................................................................................6 Appendix. The Three University Missions Ranking Results 2019....................................................7 About the Project Moscow International University Ranking is a fundamentally new academic ranking, the fi rst to evaluate all the three key university missions: education, research, and interaction with society. The ranking uses a number of new criteria calculated on the basis of objective data, and does not use any subjective reputation surveys. The initiative of creating the ranking has been supported by leading universities of Russia, China, India, Iran, Japan, and Turkey. The ranking methodology has had a wide public discussion in Russia and abroad with a total of over 100 contributing universities. The ranking expert council brings together 25 experts from 16 countries. The ranking is operated by Association of Rating, Ranking, and Other Performance Evaluations Makers (ARM), the members of which are leading ranking and research centres. The project is supported by Clarivate Analytics, providing data and metrics from InCites and Global Institutional Profi les Project (GIPP). The pilot issue of The Three University Missions ranking was released in December 2017, the second issue, in November 2018. In 2018 the ranking successfully passed an independent audit by PricewaterhouseCoopers Audit, part of PwC’s global network. © Association of Rating, Ranking, and Other Performance Evaluations Makers (ARM), 2019 The Three University Missions Moscow International University Ranking Key Facts The number of universities listed in the rankings table in 2019 signifi cantly increased to 1200 institutions from 79 countries. The rankings list published a year earlier featured 333 universities. 2019 became the fi rst year for the study results to undergo international assessment, the procedure featuring 16 recognised international experts. The verifi cation procedure covered a total of almost 60% of the universities featured in the rankings table. The experts reviewed 16 countries and territories: Austria, Brazil, China, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iran, Italy, Macau, Mexico, Poland, Russia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We considered all the critical remarks of the experts, reviewed the original data for each controversy, and made corresponding corrections where there were suffi cient grounds. “The Moscow Ranking opens a new generation of academic rankings, the second one”, noted Luiz Claudio Costa, President of IREG Observatory on Academic Rankings and Excellence. “Almost all of the existing rankings are based mainly on indicators of research and institutional reputation. It is time for a new generation of rankings that try to look more closely to the link between university and society”. The 2019 rankings found that the largest number of the world’s best universities are based in Europe: 414, or almost 35% of the published rankings table. Asia is the runner-up region with 29% of the universities featured in the rankings, followed by North America with 20%. Russia accounts for 6% of the world’s best universities, thus being ahead of entire Latin America (5%) and Oceania (4%). As regards specifi c countries, the top fi ve are the United States (212 universities), China (111), the United Kingdom (94), Russia (74), and Japan (65). Figure 1 Featured Universities by Region, 2019 Australia and Oceania — 4% Latin America — 5% Africa — 1% Russian Federation — 6% Europe — 35% North America — 20% Asia — 29% 6541A 2 The Three University Missions Moscow International University Ranking The top three universities 2019 are Harvard University, Massachussets Institute of Technology, and University of Pennsylvania. The top British universities, Cambridge and Oxford, rank fi fth and sixth respectively. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich), ranked 25th, is number one in continental Europe. Asia’s frontrunners are University of Tokyo (ranked 15th) and Peking University (ranked 16th). The top 20 is dominated by American universities. High rankings of American uni- versities are mainly attributable to large fi nancial resources and highly cited academic papers. Specifi cally, average budget to student ratio of the American universities featured in the top 100 is 1.6 and 2.3 times greater than the same indicator for Japan and the United Kingdom respectively. Similar trends are observed with the R&D volume data: on average, American universities raise 1.5 more R&D funds than Japanese ones, this gap being even greater if com- pared with, for instance, British and German universities: the U.S. universities are two and four and a half times respectively more successful. Among the top 200 universities ranked by the Normalised Citation Impact indicator, which evaluates the quality and relevance of academic papers, the United States are represented by 64 entries, followed by the United Kingdom with as few as 27 universities. Against this backdrop it is not surprising that almost a half (48) of the top 100 universities featured in the Research subrankings list are based in the U.S., and 22 of them are among the top 30. The Moscow International University Ranking is the fi rst global ranking that evaluates the universities’ contribution to society. The leaders table of the “third mission” demonstrated greater geographic diversity than those of the Education and Research components: 30 coun- tries are represented among the top 100 universities featured in the University and Society subrankings. The number of countries represented in the Education and Research top 100 are much smaller, 21 and 17, respectively. Quality of education is a particular strength of Russian universities. Six Russian universities with Lomonosov Moscow State University and St. Petersburg State University making the top, were featured in the top 100 of the Education subrankings. Russian universities are among the leaders in prizes won at international student contests, academic staff to student ratio, and show a notable success in attracting international students. 3 The Three University Missions Moscow International University Ranking Ranking Methodological Approaches The fi rst draft of the Moscow International University Ranking methodology has been developed as a result of a wide public discussion with a total of over 100 collective contributors: universities, rector councils, expert associations, and rating agencies. The list of ranking criteria was submitted for consideration to the International Expert Council of Ranking comprised of 25 renowned tertiary education experts representing the USA, the UK, Brazil, China, India, South Africa, Iran, Italy, Belgium, Turkey, Poland, and Russia. Expert discussions were continued after the pilot ranking had been released in December 2017. In 2018 some of the indicators were corrected as the result of the feedback, while the list of participating universities was extended to 500, and further to 1700 in 2019. The study results underwent international assessment. Preliminary results of university ranking by country were sent to the experts for review and commentary. Shortlisted Universities The shortlist of the Moscow International University Ranking in 2019 aimed to provide the widest possible representation of the leading multi-profi le universities all over the world so that the number of the universities representing a particular country correlated with the importance of the country in terms of global economy. Around 1700 universities that achieved leading positions in global university rankings and/or national academic rankings listed in IREG Inventory of National Rankings were included in the evaluation list in 2019. In some cases the selection was carried out on the basis of number of the university’s academic papers from 2014 to 2017 indexed in Web of Science Core Collection citation database, as per the data from the analytics tool InCites. Furthermore, narrow-focused higher education institutions, i. e. those without educational programmes in at lEast two of 6 areas of knowledge according to the OECD classifi cation, and higher education institutions with no undergraduate programmes were excluded from consideration. Changes in the System of Indicators The 2018 and 2019 rankings were based on the same set of evaluation criteria, but some of the weights of indicators were changed in the 2019 issue. The weights of the University Website Reach and Total Pages of a University’s Website Indexed by the Leading Search Engines indicators were raised, both from 3% to 4%. At the same time, the indicators that were found overrated as a result of feedback from universities, were weighted down: the weights of University Graduates Who Have a Separate Page Dedicated to Them on Wikipedia, from 9% to 8%, and Online Courses of the University Published on the Largest Global Online Platforms lost weight, from 6% to 5%. Information Sources The ranking uses only objective criteria approved by the