Round University Ranking (RUR) is an international world university rankings system which measures performance of 1100 leading world universities from 82 countries by 20 unique indicators and 4 key areas of university activities: teaching, research, international diversity, financial sustainability. All raw data for RUR Rankings is provided by an international company Thomson Reuters. RUR Rankings cover the period from 2010 to the present.

RUR Rankings is designed as an evaluation system aimed to provide sufficient information about university performance to address stakeholder’s personal tasks: students, academic community, university management, policy makers. All the raw data (like number of students, academic staff etc.) is provided by Thomson Reuters through a special data survey called Global Institutional Profiles Project (GIPP). This survey is conducted annually in the spring and covers 700-800 higher education institutions through all over the world with the prospective expansion by 1000+.

Three types of the raw data are used in RUR: Statistical data. In GIPP universities provide information about 20 raw indicators which are used to generate 100 scaled indicators (ratio between 2 values) of which in turn 20 are used in RUR Rankings. Bibliomteric data. For bibliometric/scientometrics information RUR Rankings use the raw data extracted from Web of Science Core Collection. Reputation data. As a part of Global Institutional Profiles Project, a special Academic Reputation Survey is conducted annually. Each reputation survey include around 60,000 responses from 10,000 respondents which present all dimensions of global academic community. Please find more details about reputation survey in the methodology.

Round University Ranking is the comprehensive system of world university rankings which includes 4 main rankings with prospectives for expansions and also sub-rankings within the 4 key rankings:

RUR Overall Rankings Overall Ranking evaluates instituional performance by 20 indicators which are grouped in 4 dimensions. In turn each dimension of Overall ranking forms a separate ranking where 5 metrics of each 4 groups are included. The list of RUR rankings by dimensions is the following: Teaching Ranking; Research Ranking; International Diversity Ranking; Financial Sustainability Ranking.

RUR Subject Rankings The methodology of subject rankings is identical to the methodology of the overall ranking. In rankings by 6 broad subject areas we use the same 20 indicators, grouped in 4 dimension areas. What differentiate these two sets of rankings is the raw data used in each of the group.

Each of the subject rankings falls into 5 rankings: overall (20 indicators) and 4 dimension rankings (5 indicators per each ranking).

RUR Subject Rankings: Humanities; Life Sciences; Natural Sciences; Technical Sciences; Social Sciences; Medical Sciences.

RUR Reputation Rankings RUR Reputation Rankings are aimed to measure universities brand, influence of a particular institution globally. This ranking assess institutions by only two indicators (teaching and research reputation) with the same weight of 50% per each indicator.

RUR Research Perfomance Ranking RUR Research Performance Ranking evaluates institution’s performance in terms of its scientific effectiveness, quality and recognition of researches conducted in certain university. The selection of scientometric indicators, some of which coincides with RUR Research sub ranking metrics, is used in this ranking. The list of indicators is: Normalizaed citation impact; Citation per papers; Papers per academic and research staff; Research reputation; International co-authored papers.