Webometrics is one of the most dynamic and independent rankings published twice a year by the CybermetricsLab, the research group of the Spanish National Research Council. The ranking is based on the automatic information from search engines as well as bibliometric and commercial webometric databases. The ranking’s methodology is aimed to expand the opportunities for objective analysis of university information and content on the Internet and includes four indicators: Presence, 5%, Visibility, 50%, Openness, 10% and Excellence, 35%.

According to the second edition of 2020, VolSU is among top 50 Russian universities and 2870^th in the world, thereby significantly improving its results of 2019 by 15 and 468 positions, respectively.

Webometrics Ranking of World Universities covers more than 30 000 Higher Education Institutions worldwide where 1097 are Russian universities. Only 12,000 universities, less than half, including 359 Russian ones, are visible in the ranking list. Harvard and Stanford Universities as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technologyare among the top three in the global ranking. The highest position among Russian universities was taken by Lomonosov Moscow State University. The university is ranked 211. It is followed by St. Petersburg State University with the 437^th place and The Higher School of Economics, which is 501^st in the Webometrics Ranking.

VolSU received the highest score in ‘Openness‘, i.e. for the content quality in terms of its uniqueness and citation on external resources. The increase of the number of external links depends mainly on the attractiveness and information accessibility to users in Russian and foreign languages. For prospective students, their parents and our foreign colleagues, this year English, French and Chinese versions of the VolSU official website have been prepared. Positive dynamics is also demonstrated in the number of cited research papers, which shows the improvement of the profile maintenance of VolSU scientists in Google Scholar Citations.