In The Know: Webometrics Ranking of World Universities

The Cybermetrics Lab, a research group based in Spain, launched in 2004 the “Webometrics Ranking of World Universities” on the basis of the content of their official websites.

The group, which is part of the largest public research body in Spain called Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), initiated the project “to convince academic and political communities of the importance of the Web publication not only for dissemination of the academic knowledge but for measuring scientific activities, performance and impact.”

It also aims to motivate institutions and scholars to have greater Web presence, as well as encourage researchers to publish more and better scientific content online, which is easily accessible to the public.

Institutional websites are judged based on their size or the number of pages available on search engines (20 percent); visibility or the number of external links (50 percent); rich files or the volume of relevant academic and publication activities (15 percent); and scholar or the number of papers and citations for each academic domain (15 percent).

In its latest ranking published in July, US-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology emerged at the top of 19,403 institutions. It was followed by other American universities: Harvard University (2nd), Stanford University (3rd), Cornell University (4th) and University of California Berkeley (5th).

Asian universities in the top 100 include National Taiwan University (24th), University of Tokyo in Japan (34th), Kyoto University in Japan (56th), National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan (67th), University of Hong Kong (82nd), National University of Singapore (85th) and National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan (89th).

On the other hand, the University of the Philippines Diliman was ranked 918th, followed by De La Salle University (2,096th); Ateneo de Manila University (2,525th); UP Los Baños (2,843rd); and University of the Philippines, a separate Web domain (3,489th).

Trailing them are the University of Sto. Tomas (4,028th), Xavier University Ateneo de Cagayan (4,301st); UP Mindanao (4,554th); UP Manila (4,662nd); and Mindanao State University- Iligan Institute of Technology (5,159th).

The complete list is available at www.webometrics.info.

“If the Web performance of an institution is below the expected position according to their academic excellence, university authorities should reconsider their Web policy, promoting substantial increases of the volume and quality of their electronic publications,” the group said. Lawrence de Guzman, Inquirer Research