<div class="gmail_quote"><div style="word-wrap:break-word"><div>Forwarding (with a little editing for language) from Sigmetrics (where an active discussion is taking place)<br><blockquote type="cite"><div class="gmail_quote">
<br>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.</div>
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Access to the Rankings portal: <a href="http://www.webometrics.info/" target="_blank">http://www.webometrics.info/</a><br>
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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.<br>
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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.</div>
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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.<br>
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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.<br>
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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<br>
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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<br>
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Ranking of Research Centers: <a href="http://research.webometrics.info/" target="_blank">http://research.webometrics.<u></u>info/</a><span><font color="#888888"><br>
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Isidro F. Aguillo, HonDr.<br>
The Cybermetrics Lab, CSIC<br>
Madrid. SPAIN<br>
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<a href="mailto:isidro.aguillo@cchs.csic.es" target="_blank">isidro.aguillo@cchs.csic.es</a><br>
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