Among 1484 universities from the Russian Federation ranked in Webometrics in 2015, NSU takes the third position following only Lomonosov Moscow State University and Saint Petersburg State University.
Webometrics has a large coverage of world universities as it ranks more than 20 000 universities worldwide and takes into consideration different university missions (not only research). Web presence and visibility are used as indicators of global performance of a university. These indicators take into account the teaching commitment, the research results, the perceived international prestige, the links with the community, including industrial and economic sectors, of the university. The top in the world ranking is traditionally represented by American universities. NSU occupies the 640th line.
The Ranking Web or Webometrics is the largest academic ranking of Higher Education Institutions. Since 2004 and every six months the Cybermetrics Lab compiles the ranking which provides reliable information about the performance of universities from all over the world based on their web presence and impact.
The objective of the ranking is not to evaluate websites, their design or usability or the popularity of their contents according to the number of visits or visitors. Web indicators are considered as proxies in the evaluation of the university global performance, taking into account its activities and outputs and their relevance and impact. Some of the criteria are the number of external links, the number of documents measured from the number of rich files in a web domain, and the number of publications collected by Google Scholar database.
The two main parameters are visibility and activity. The former is based not only on formal publications, but also on informal scholarly communication and takes into account the total number of unique external links received (inlinks) by a site, according to Yahoo Site Explorer. Such links indicate the institutional prestige, the academic performance, the value of the information, and the usefulness of the services as introduced in the webpages. The latter parameter, activity, is based on the total number of webpages hosted in the main webdomain (including all the subdomains and directories) of the university as indexed by the largest commercial search engine Google, the number of rich files (pdf, doc, docx, ppt) published in dedicated websites, and the number of academic papers published in high impact international journals.
