[Air-L] Ranking Web of Universities. January 2011 Edition

[Isidro F. Aguillo]

The Cybermetrics Lab released today the 12th edition of its Ranking Web 
of Universities. This is the world broadest coverage ranking of 
Universities showing the performance of 12,000 higher education 
institutions worldwide.

The Ranking is freely available:
http://www.webometrics.info/

This January 2011 edition's introduces new improved features including 
an updated Directory, more national and regional Rankings and 
recalculated indicators for better reflecting academic impact of the 
universities’ web presence.

Focusing not only on the research dimension, but considering also other 
academic missions like teaching, community engagement and knowledge and 
technological transfer, the Ranking Web is offering a series of truly 
global indicators that reveal the outstanding performers, the excellence 
in education and the international impact and visibility of the 
universities.

The main results from the current edition are:
• US dominance: The Ranking is headed by MIT and Harvard University, 
followed by Stanford and California Berkeley. There are 115 North 
American universities among the Top 200, including 16 Canadian ones.
• Academic Digital Divide. The concerning gap between US and the 
Developed World Universities is not being closed. Only 59 European 
institutions are cited in the Top 200, including 10 UK ones, mostly in 
the leading group (Cambridge and University College of London are the EU 
best ones)
• Language barriers. The globalization of the Web penalized the 
international visibility of French, Japanese or Korean universities. 
Australian, Scandinavian, Singapore and surprisingly Taiwanese 
institutions show a performance close to the Canadian universities.
• Size is a relevant factor in the emerging countries. Sao Paulo in 
Brazil, UNAM in México and Peking and Tsinghua in China are examples to 
be considered. None Indian university appears in top 500.
• Open Access policies. The scores show that many universities are 
launching big efforts to populate their repositories, greatly expanding 
the availability of academic papers. On the contrary, there are still a 
few hundred institutions with two or more web domains, a bad practice 
that penalizes not only their rank but their overall visibility in 
search engines.

"In this edition a new indicator has been applied for reflecting more 
accurately the academic impact of the web contents" said Isidro F. 
Aguillo, Head of the Cybermetrics Lab. "The goal is to provide a 
complete overview of the academia worldwide, without using subjective 
criteria or excluding universities solely by technical reasons and 
guaranteeing no economical or political interests affect the scores".
“We are very surprised by the use of incomplete or flawed rankings for 
recognition of foreign university degrees. The current report 
constitutes a robust evaluation resource that can useful worldwide" said 
Isidro Aguillo.

About The Cybermetrics Lab
The Cybermetrics Lab is a research group devoted to Science Evaluation 
by means of analysis, visualization and evaluation of the information 
published in the public Web. The Cybermetrics Lab belongs to the Spanish 
Research Council (CSIC), the largest scientific public body in Spain and 
one of the most important networks of research centers in Europe.
The Cybermetrics Lab publishes several scientific information portals 
including the Webometrics Rankings of Research centers 
(research.webometrics.info), Hospitals (hospitals.webometrics.info), 
Business Schools (business-schools.webometrics.info) and Repositories 
(repositories.webometrics.info).

About the Webometrics Project
The Webometrics Rankings are published since 2004, analyzing more than 
45.000 academic and research organizations from all over the world. 
About 20.000 Higher Education Institutions are included in the Catalogue 
of Universities that is probably the largest and the most updated (a new 
edition appears every January & July) world directory of academic web 
domains.

Media Contact
Isidro F. Aguillo, HcDr
Head, The Cybermetrics Lab
Email: isidro.aguillo at cchs.csic.es