Promotion of universities in the rankings as a result of improving management efficiency

Introduction. Nowadays, one of the assessments of the universities effectiveness is their positions in various rankings (top-lists). Therefore, it is relevant for higher education organizations to get and advance in national and international rankings. The purpose of this particular study is to increase the efficiency of the functioning of the university through the use of scientifically sound management decisions Materials and methods. The research materials were data on the number of publications in the databases of WoS/ Scopus, RSCI and the number of scientific and pedagogical workers of fifty universities included in the TOP-50 of the well-known private rating of scientific activity in Russia for the period from 2017 to 2021. Methods of mathematical and simulation modeling, methods of descriptive statistics and comparative data analysis were used in the study Results of the study. As a part of the study of one well-known national Russian universities rankings for research activities, a methodology was proposed for predicting the places of universities in the ranking based on modeling the dynamics of publication activity. Therefore, the predictive estimates of indicators and places in the ranking were obtained for sixteen universities from the TOP-50. As a result, it was revealed that more than 50% of the reviewed universities have reached the III stage of scientific maturity (saturation stage) and function at the limit of their capabilities in terms of the number of annual publications. As an example, the results of medium-term forecasting of places in the ranking of scientific activity for 16 universities from the TOP-50 and Petrozavodsk State University (which is in the second hundred of the ranking) were obtained. Projects of management solutions have been formed that allow a university, not included in the TOP-50, to get into this range for a limited time. The proposed projects of management decisions are proposed to be achieved through the involvement in the publication activities of NPOs that do not have highly rated publications, but actively present the results of their research in Russian publications included in the RSCI and the Higher Attestation Commission. Discussion and conclusion. The authors of the study proposed a methodology for predicting the places of universities in the ranking. They also described an approach to the promotion of the university in the ranking by improving the values of its own indicators, which allows you to determine the control parameters and their limit values, taking into account existing constraints (time, financial, productive, organizational). A variant of drawing up an ordinal scale of productive capabilities of employees is presented, which may form the basis of recommendations for making managerial decisions to increase the university's performance targets. From a practical point of view, the presented results can be useful to the administration of the university for the analysis and management of performance indicators in order to promote the university in the rankings by increasing its own efficiency of functioning.