[GOAL] Ranking Web (Webometrics) of Universities

[Stevan Harnad]

Forwarding (with a little editing for language) from Sigmetrics (where an
active discussion is taking place)


The fourteenth edition of Web Ranking Universities has just been
published . 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 Ranking
utility and reflect more accurately what is 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 is it mission or discipline biased (biomedical
research at the expense of other activities) nor is it subject 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 includes only 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 open publication -- has overtaken Cambridge (20)  (which
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 Cambridge, the European universities are represented in the top 50
by Oxford (25), ETH Zurich (29) and the University College of London (43).
Imperial College is still out of the top 50 due to its confusing web naming
practices. Charles University is the only Central & Eastern European
University 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) appear in the top 500

Besides the Ranking of Universities the portal provides access to the
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 top the list

Ranking of Research Centers:
http://research.webometrics.**info/<http://research.webometrics.info/>

-- 
****************************

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

isidro.aguillo at cchs.csic.es

****************************
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20120901/2666565e/attachment.html