HSE Improves its Position in QS BRICS Ranking Top-100

Only three of the Top-10 Russian universities, HSE, Tomsk State University, and MEPhI, managed to improve their positions compared with last year. HSE moved up from 63^rd to 62^nd place in the ranking.

The QS BRICS Ranking evaluates universities based on their reputations as academic institutions and employers, publication activities, level of internationalization and faculty/student ratio. HSE had a positive showing in all of these indicators.

HSE advanced considerably with respect to its share  of international students (from 109^th in 2015 to 77^th in 2016) and faculty/student ratio (from 19^th to 16^th place).

‘If we look at the dynamics in the rankings of Russian universities, the changes are minor or not there at all. Therefore, all Russian universities are moving forward at the same pace’, explained Liudmila Solntseva, Director of the HSE Ranking Information Centre.

The slight decline in position on the part of several Russian universities was driven by rising competition, such as the growing number of Chinese (+19), Brazilian (+15), and Indian (+13) universities in the ranking.

In addition, several changes have been introduced to the ranking’s methodology and, thus, the results for 2016 cannot be considered as being fully successive to previous years.

‘This year’s data on publications and reputation were completely taken from last year’s ranking, meaning that it doesn’t reflect growing publication activity, which is significant among the 5-100 universities. On average, over 20% of publications were still not considered within this approach. According to the QS data, the reputation of the 5-100 universities is growing annually, but the most recent ranking doesn’t account for 2016 surveys, thus leading to some negative dynamics. In addition, the rules of publication selection have changed. QS used to take into account publications by authors affiliated with no more than 10 institutions. Now, different rules apply to different subject areas. For example, total affiliations may reach 59 for papers in physics, 7 for sociology, philosophy and linguistics, 6 for political science, and 4 for English language. This change has negatively influenced universities specializing in social sciences,’ Solntseva noted.

Information:

The QS BRICS Ranking was launched in 2013. This year, the QS team considered applications from 421 universities and presented an expanded ranking of the 250 best universities in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (only a Top-200 of universities was earlier presented in the ranking).

The ranking evaluates universities according to 8 key parameters: academic reputation over 5 years (30%); reputation as an employer over 5 years (20%); faculty/student ratio (20%); papers per faculty (10%); faculty with PhDs(10%); citations per paper (5%); international students (2.5%); and international faculty (2.5%).