ASSESSING UNIVERSITY DIGITAL MATURITY AS A DRIVER OF INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIVENESS: IMPROVING THE EVALUATION MECHANISM

Abstract

This paper argues that a university’s position in international rankings is determined less by the quality of its academic
work than by its capacity to document that work digitally. The proposition is examined through the case of the National University of
Uzbekistan, whose positions across four international ranking systems in 2025–2026 diverge by more than 600 places. The dispersion
is mapped against the evidence channel each ranking relies on — reputation survey, self-reported institutional data, or bibliometric
extraction — and a six-dimension University Digital Maturity Index is proposed as a diagnostic instrument. The analysis shows that the
university performs strongest where evidence is collected externally and weakest where it must be supplied from its own systems. Five
mechanisms for improving the national evaluation framework are formulated