The international information group Interfax has published the results of the VIII annual National University Ranking for the 2016/2017 academic year.

Lomonosov Moscow State University is on the first place. MEPhI is on the second line, St. Petersburg State University is on the third place. The fourth place was taken by the National Research University "Higher School of Economics"(HSE), the fifth leader is Novosibirsk National Research University (NSU).

The Top 10 also includes: Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT, 6th place), ITMO University (7th place), National Research Tomsk State University (8th place), Peoples' Friendship University of Russia (9th place) and National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University (TPU, 10th place).

Within the rating, 264 leading universities of Russia were evaluated, which is 26 universities more than in the last year's edition. The rating covers 21 participants of the 5-100 project, 29 national research universities, 10 federal universities, and 33 flagship universities.

The editor of the National University Rankings, Alexei Chaplygin, notes that MSU remains the unchanged leader since the foundation of the rating in 2010, and MEPhI has retained the second place for the second consecutive year due to the high level of international cooperation and work with high-tech business.

"MEPhI corresponds to the level of a world-class university on most criteria, despite the historically formed closeness, which, thanks in large part to participation in Project 5-100, has been successfully overcome," Chaplygin said.

Activities of higher education institutions are evaluated according to six parameters in a 1000-point scale, the integral evaluation is formed in six main areas: education (20%), research (20%), social environment (15%), international and interregional cooperation (15%), innovation 15%) and the university brand (15%). On the basis of each of the directions, six parametric private ratings are also published.

The sources of the data are open materials on the activity of universities, the personal data collected by the experts of Interfax, the monitoring data of the universities of the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia, as well as the results of the analysis carried out with the help of the System for Complex News Analysis (SCAN-Interfax).

A special project of the international information group "Interfax" National University Ranking was launched in 2010 with the aim of developing and testing new mechanisms of an independent evaluation system for Russian universities.

National University Ranking 2017