Irkutsk State University has improved its positions in Webometrics (Webometrics Ranking of World Universities), an international ranking of Universities’ web-sites. Currently, ISU is placed 22nd among Russian Universities and has advanced to the 2055th position among the world's educational institutions.

Webometrics Ranking of World Universities is considered to be one of the most powerful ratings to measure the online performance of educational institutions. This ranking system has an impact upon achievements in such leading university rankings as Times Higher Education and QS. Therefore, Webometrics stimulates Universities to promote their web-presence, strengthen their positions and play a significant role in the education system worldwide.

University’s web-activities are in correlation with the number of pages and scientific articles available at Universities’ web-sites including those of the main domain, faculties and conference web-pages, scientific and educational on-line projects, etc. Thus, Webometrics Ranking can estimate research output of Universities through studying their web-sites.

The ranking system analyses 25 000 world's universities. Only 6 Russian Universities’ web-sites are ranked in Top-1000 (the total number of Russian Universities’ web-sites under review amounts to 1531). Among leaders there could be named Lomonosov Moscow State University (138th position in the world), Saint-Petersburg State University (544th position in the world) and Novosibirsk State University (640th position in the world). Irkutsk region Universities are ranked as follows: National Research Irkutsk State University – the 38th among Russian and 2830th among world Universities, Eurasian Linguistic Institute (former Irkutsk State University of Foreign Languages) – the 107th (4 788th), Irkutsk State Railway Transport Engineering University – the 127 th (5 207th), Baikal State University of Economics and Law – the 160th (5 910th), Irkutsk State University of Agriculture – the 432th (11 454th), and Irkutsk State University of Medicine – the 616th (14 009th).

Reference

The "Webometrics Ranking of World Universities" is the project run by the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC - Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas). The Webometrics is the largest academic ranking of higher education institutions worldwide, with the results being published twice a year. 

Methodology. Webometrics's ranking indicators fall into two categories of equal coefficient: Visibility (50%) and Activity (50%). The indicator Visibility comprises of one index, while the indicator Activity combines three characteristics.

The structure of indicators is as follows:

Visibility (50%):

• Impact.  The indicator counts all the external inlinks that the University webdomain receives from third parties. Those links are regarded as the markers of the institutional prestige.

Activity (50%):

• Presence (1/3). The total number of webpages hosted in the main webdomain (including all the subdomains and directories) of the university as indexed by Google.
• Openness (1/3). The number of files (pdf, doc, docx, ppt) published in dedicated websites according to the search engine GoogleScholar. The objective is to consider recent publications that now are those published between 2008 and 2012 (new period).
• Excellence (1/3). The total number of papers being part of the 10% most cited papers in their respective scientific fields. The data provider is Scimago group that annually works out research and educational organizations ranking according to the SCOPUS database.