International news agency “Rossiya Segodnya” and British company QS Quacquarelli Symonds presented the Russian version of annual QS University Rankings: Emerging Europe and Central Asia that comprises HEIs from the developing countries in Europe and Central Asia.

In 2017 the ranking highlighted the top 300 universities of the region located in 24 countries, 97 of them are situated in Russia.

Lomonosov Moscow State University, Novosibirsk State University and Saint Petersburg State University maintained their top rankings in the regional list released.

Penza State University was again listed among the top 200 HEIs. PSU occupied the place in the group from 191st to 200th and shared it with such HEIs as Ufa State Aviation Technical University, M.K. Ammosov North Eastern Federal University, Kaliningrad State Technical University and Ulyanovsk State University.

PSU managed to occupy the 58th place among 97 Russian HEIs.

In Penza region PSU is the only university entered this ranking.

The top universities of the region were determined according to nine indicators:
•    Academic reputation (30%, calculated on the basis of international survey of academics);
•    Employer reputation (20%, calculated on the basis of international survey of employers);
•    Faculty/student ratio (15%, data provided by the universities and open sources);
•    Papers per faculty (10%, number of published articles per academic faculty member calculated using data from Scopus/Elsevier);
•    Web impact (10%, based on the data provided by the Webometrics ranking);
•    Citations per paper (5%, number of citations per an article calculated using data from Scopus/Elsevier);
•    Staff with a PhD (5%, data provided by the universities and open sources);
•    International faculty (2,5%, data provided by the universities and open sources);
•    International students (2,5%, data provided by the universities and open sources).

The analysts from Quacquarelli Symonds ranking agency noted that PSU had a high rate according to the indicator of “Staff with a PhD”.