[Air-L] Ranking Web (Webometrics) of Universities

[Isidro F. Aguillo]

It just have been published the fourteenth edition of Web Ranking 
Universities. The July 2012 edition includes nearly 21,000 higher 
education institutions worldwide, classified according to their academic 
and research performance, prestige and international visibility and 
their commitment to open access policies.

Access to the Rankings portal: http://www.webometrics.info/

In this edition, some indicators have been modified to increase the 
Ranking utility and reflect more accurately the recent, especially the 
pursuit of excellence. The Ranking, published by a nonprofit research 
group belonging to a public academic institution, can be distinguished 
from other similar classifications because it is not based on prestige 
obtained from decades old prizes, nor it is mission or discipline biased 
(biomedical research at the expenses of other activities) or succumb to 
commercial or political interests as shown by suspicious 
over-representation of certain countries.

The report provides the results for four indicators: Presence, which 
measures the volume of information published on the web; Impact, built 
from the links received from third parties; Openness, counting the 
number of documents that are freely available from scientific 
repositories and Excellence, which only includes the quality papers that 
are among the 10% most cited of each discipline.

As in previous editions Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Berkeley lead the 
world ranking. The first non-US University is Sao Paulo (15), which 
thanks to its commitment to the open publication overcame Cambridge (20) 
that should improve its current repository. Asia is performing well, 
with Tokyo, National of Taiwan, Kyoto, National of Singapore and 
Tsinghua among the Top 100, followed closely by Shanghai Jiao Tong and 
Hong Kong.

Besides of Cambridge, the European universities are represented in the 
top 50 by Oxford (25), ETH Zurich (29) and the University College of 
London (43). The Imperial College is still out due to its confusing web 
naming practices. Charles University is the only Central & Eastern 
European University with a rank among the top 100.

The performance of Canadian (22 in the Top 500) and Australian (15 in 
the top 500) universities is outstanding. Only two African universities 
(Cape Town and Stellenbosch) appears in the top 500

Besides the Ranking of Universities the portal provides access to 
rankings of Research centers (8000), Hospitals (16000) Business Schools 
(1500) and Repositories (1600). Among the research centers, the U.S. 
National Institute of Health (NIH) and the NASA in that top the list

Ranking of Research Centers: http://research.webometrics.info/

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Isidro F. Aguillo, HonDr.
The Cybermetrics Lab, CSIC
Madrid. SPAIN

isidro.aguillo at cchs.csic.es

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