[BOAI] Ranking Web (Webometrics) of Universities

[Peter Suber]

[Forwarding from Isidro F. Aguillo.  --Peter Suber.]


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/<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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