According to the updated Ranking Web of Universities (Webometrics) data, Sumy State University has significantly improved its position in the world ranking, entering the top 1500 out of more than 31,000 universities in the world for the first time in its history. At the same time, Sumy State University, in comparison with the previous version of the rating, moved from the third position to the second one among higher education institutions in Ukraine, yielding only to Taras Shevchenko KNU.

Sumy State University was estimated according to the "Transparency" indicator based on the sum of citations of the university best researchers according to Google Scholar data. Compared to the previous version of the rating, the university has significantly improved its position on the "Impact" indicator determined by the number of external links to the university materials posted on the web space. Sumy State University has also improved its position according to the "Excellence" indicator determined by the number of publications among the TOP-10% of the most cited in each of all fields of knowledge according to the Scimago database.

In general, the Webometrics rating is updated every six months; in the latest version, 312 higher education institutions of Ukraine were ranked.