Press releases

24 Oct 2019

Belarusian State University jumps up Best Global Universities ranking

MINSK, 24 October (BelTA) – Belarusian State University (BSU) has climbed up the Best Global Universities ranking. So far, the BSU is the only Belarusian university featured in the ranking, BelTA learned from the BSU press service.

The latest ranking was released on 23 October. “The BSU ranks 346th, up 351 notches from the previous year. The BSU also ranks 153rd on the Best Global Universities in Europe. Moreover, the university was included in the subject rankings in physics and chemistry, securing 129th and 553rd positions respectively,” the press service said. The BSU is second best university in the CIS, behind Lomonosov Moscow State University that occupies the 266th position in the global ranking. Poland’s University of Warsaw and Jagiellonian University are 286th and 343rd respectively. The University of Tartu in Estonia placed 322nd.

U.S. Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University top the ranking. All in all, the ranking encompasses 1,500 universities from 81 countries, which is around 5% of the total of 30,000 universities in the world.

“The basic requirement for a university to make the ranking is to have more than 1,500 publications at the web-based research platform Web of Science in the last five years. The latest ranking is based on the data for the period of 2013-2017. Such a rapid accession of the BSU became possible thanks to the growing number of articles by the BSU staff published in international scientific journals. At present, this number exceeds 3,000, leaving all other Belarusian universities far behind. Out of these publications, 123 articles were among 1% of the most cited articles in the world. A third of Belarusian publications in the Web of Science was written by the BSU staff,” the press service stressed.

The Best Global Universities ranking has been compiled by the company U.S. News & World Report for 30 years. Before 2014, the company analyzed performance of only U.S. universities. However, later it expanded the list of countries. At present, the global ranking also includes 28 subject and five regional rankings.

All in all, there are more than 20 various global rankings. For example, the BSU placed 351st in the QS World University Rankings released in June 2019, making it into 1.5% of the world top universities. So far, the BSU is featured in the rankings of 12 agencies.