LTSNU in the world university rankings

19.10.2019

Online rankings of educational institutions determine the level of their Web presence.

These rankings are based on web metrics for university web resources. The most famous among them are Ranking Web of Universities (Webometrics) and World Universities Web Ranking (uniRank).

One should note that Webometrics is a ranking system for the world’s universities based on a composite indicator that takes into account the number of pages in the university’s domain (all subdomains and file types are taken into account, including PDF format) according to Google; the number of external sources containing backlinks to the university’s web pages is calculated using the Ahrefs.com external link analysis service and the Majestic link analysis system for search engine optimization and Internet marketing; the number of quotes by the leading authors of the institution on Google Scholar; the number of articles of scientists working at the university, included in the top 10% of the most cited in 26 areas of science according to Scimago calculations. At the same time, traffic indicators and website design are not taken into account. Thus, indirectly through the indicators of university represence in the web space, the scientific, educational and social missions of universities are evaluated. According to Webometrics developers, its goal is to improve the presence of the academic and research institutions on the Web and to promote the open access publication of scientific results.

The uniRank measures the popularity of universities by the popularity of their web resources. According to the authors of the ranking, this helps international students, teachers and scientists to find out how a particular educational institution is popular in a particular country.

In order to calculate the position in the non-academic uniRank ranking, a special algorithm is used based on indicators collected from popular web analytics sources: Moz Domain Authority, Alexa Global Rank, SimilarWeb Global Rank, Majestic Referring Domains, Majestic Trust Flow. During the selection, webometric indicators are taken into account, such as the level of site traffic, the number of active links and the metrics of the flow, the number of unique visitors, the number of page views from mobile devices and desktop PCs.

The table 1 provides information concerning the position of  Luhansk Taras Shevchenko National University in Webometrics and uniRank for the periond of 2018-2019.

Table 1

Position of Luhansk Taras Shevchanko National University
in Webometrics and uniRank, 2018-2019