RUR World University Rankings 2024 | Must-know for Students

• Publisher: RUR Ranking Agency (Moscow, Russia), Russia
• Latest ranking publication date: 30 May, 2024
• Publication frequency: Annual
• Geographic focus: Global
• Ranking type: University rankings.
• Year of first publication: 2013
• 1165 universities in ranking

RUR focuses on 4 main criteria for their university ranking: teaching, research, international diversity and financial sustainability which are calculated using 20 indicators. Teaching and research are the main focus and make up 80% of all of the indicators used in the ranking, divided evenly across the two items.

The teaching quality of universities is gauged according to the faculty to student ratio, the faculty to the quantity of degrees granted at different levels (how many students make it all the way to the end of their degree) and the institution’s global teaching reputation. This last item is based on an Academic Reputation Survey performed yearly by Clarivate Analytics. That survey is also the data source for the other two instances where reputation is a criteria.

The research section of the data is mostly bibliometric/scientometric and considers the publications and citations of the institution’s staff, but also takes into consideration the number of post-graduate students who present their thesis, and their overall graduation rate plus the uni’s global research reputation.

International diversity criteria bases its relevance on the view that the capacity of a university to attract staff (and students) from outside of their region/country positively affects the quality of education provided at the university. The criteria used by RUR also takes into account international collaboration on publications and the institution’s reputation beyond their regional influence.

Without the means to finance their endeavors, pay staff, buy equipment, stock libraries, etc, no institution can consistently provide high quality education to its students. This is why financial matters enter into the evaluation process as a small portion of the overall ranking criteria.

The ranking by fields follows the same methodology as the overall world ranking with a tiny adjustment in the research criteria: Where the general ranking considers the percentage of students studying at a post-bachelor level, the subject rankings uses the percentage of doctoral students who complete and receive their degrees.

Types of Data Collected Directly by the Publisher

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External databases/data providers used

Clarivate Analytics Web of Science Core Collection Scopus Google Scholar

Criteria for including/excluding universities

must request to be included

Criteria Classification

• 40% Academic Performance
• 50% Teaching/International Diversity
• 10% Other (financial sustainability)

• Research publications and citations
• Academic reputation - survey or other
• Student Survey
• Internationalization (% of foreign staff/students/exchange)
• Employer reputation survey or Salary data

Methodology

https://roundranking.com/methodology/methodology.html

Rating

3.5 / 5.0

Popularity

Google results for: RUR "World University Ranking": 31500

PROS

• transparent, easy to understand, view and filter
• reasonable size, doesn’t overwhelm

CONS

• all data from one source (though they interpret that data according to their own established criteria)

Practical use

This ranking doesn’t generally have any major surprises but the criteria is well-rounded and clearly defined. It is super easy to sift through the results according to the 4 different criteria and country or regions. Something I particularly like about RUR rankings is that, unlike other rankings, they don’t require you to load and reload the data (and reload, and reload, ad aeternam) to view the entire list. Also, the page isn’t cluttered by the data itself or constant ads.

Criticism

Creating a ranking that is useful to people from all sectors of society with any relation to post-secondary education is a big task. Interestingly, one of the criticisms about this ranking is that it has not received much attention from the global community despite the fact that it includes information which many other rankings do not, and the RUR rankings have been lauded for being more transparent, easy to interpret and more comprehensive than some of the other big name rankings.

One thing of note is that the data used to evaluate the universities is approximately 3-5 years old. In theory, this shouldn’t make much difference to the average user, but it might be important to some.