MOSCOW, August 15. /TASS/. Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU) has been ranked 93rd in the 2017 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), released by the ShanghaiRanking Consultancy on Tuesday. MSU has dropped six places compared to the 2016 ranking.

As in 2016, the ranking’s top-500 includes another two Russian universities - St. Petersburg State University and Novosibirsk State University, that entered the 301-400 and 401-500 groups respectively. Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology has made it into the raking’s top-800, entering the 501-600 group.

The top-5 of the 2017 Academic Ranking of World Universities includes Harvard University, Stanford University, University of Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of California, Berkeley.

The Academic Ranking of World Universities was first published in 2003 by the Center for World-Class Universities (CWCU) at the Graduate School of Education of China’s Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The ranking uses "six indicators to rank world universities, including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, number of highly cited researchers selected by Thomson Reuters, number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science, number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index - Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, and per capita performance of a university." ARWU is considered to be one of the three leading university measures, alongside the QS World University Rankings and Times Higher Education World University Rankings. The ranking particularly influences the popularity of Russian universities among Chinese applicants.