Webometrics Ranking of World Universities

8/3/2019 Webometrics Ranking of World Universities

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www.webometrics.info

WEBOMETRICS RANKING OF

WORLD UNIVERSITIES

1 Isidro F. Aguillo

Cybermetrics Lab (CSIC), Madrid, Spain

3rd Meeting of the International Rankings Expert Group (IREG-3)

Shanghai Jiao Tong University, October 28 - 31, 2007


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AGENDA

New role of the Web in the scholarly communication

Rankings: advantages and disadvantages

Collecting Web data and building indicators

Cover age: Not only World-Class Universities

Search engines, the new intermediaries

Institutional web domain: uses and abuses

WR, the combined indicator

The Ranking: Current results and future developments

Structure of the ranking Problems: Gaps, duplicates, extra indicators

Results: Correlation

Success? Expected and actual visitors

Academic digital divide


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ABOUT US

CSIC, Spanish National Research Council

The largest public research body in Spain

126 institutes devoted mainly to basic science

20% of the total Spanish scientific output

2 Nobel Prizes

Cybermetrics Lab

Research groupat Center ofScientific Information and Documentation

Editors of e-journal Cybermetrics

EU projects EICSTES and WISER

MAVIR network Consulting services to universities

Staff: Coordinator, 4 PhD, 1 technicians


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ABOUT THE RANKING

Primary objective was not to rank institutions

Promote web publication

Support Open Access initiatives

Current design

Larger coverage than other similar Rankings Including developing countries institutions

Not focusing only in research results

Activity, visibility, impact, prestige, and quality better reflected in

the Web presence

Paying attention to Web bad practices

Web Publish or Perish


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IMPORTANCE OF THE WEB PRESENCE

The new Academic global market Increased mobility ofprofessors and alumni

International competition forhuman resources and funding

Getting prestige and visibility in the digital world

Web is the best showcase for Universities All missions covered: teaching+research+transfer

Intangibles and the web contents

Freedom of teaching

Self-organisation and maturity

Access to resources

Scholarly (formal and informal) communication Universal target groups

Colleagues all over the world

Prospective students worldwide

Economic interested stakeholders

Gener al (huge) audiences

Richerand diversified contents at cheaper costs


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METRICS OF THE WEB

Contents size Correlated with the knowledge production capabilities of the institution

number ofpotential authors (faculty members, staff, alumni)

available (access to) resources

internal and external policies

Quality resources Difficult criteria

authoritativeness of the scholars (university)

peer review 2.0

formats (file types), language (lingua franca)

Visibility Hypertext links networks

New motivations, many linkers (siters)

Open versus Closed (international) impact

Popularity Users, visits, behavior, evolution, referrers

Methodological problems (global comparison no feasible)


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RANKINGS: ADVANTAGES AND SHORTCOMINGS

Advantages Combine many variables

Even heterogeneous variables

Easy to understand

Temporal series

Disadvantages Simplistic

Weighting usually arbitrary

Potential users undefined

Rankings in the Web PageRankalgorithm (ranking web pages by a weighted visibility indicator) is

key for explaining the success of Google search engine

TrafficRank: Ranking of web domains according to the number of visits

intercepted by the Alexa system

Model for a combined indicator Webometrics Rank (derived from Web Impact Factor)

Visibility:Size (1:1)


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WORLD RANKINGS

Biases in the indicators Focus on research (bibliometric data)

Limited info (lack of standardization) about inputs (personnel, funding) Reputation is very subjective, dependent ofpopulation surveyed

University is a complex, multifaceted institution Web indicators reflects teaching, researchand knowledge transfer missions

But, they do not measure them separately


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WEBOMETRICS RANKING

First published in 2004 Since 2006, two editions (January and July)

World coverage

Higher education Institutions (mostly universities): +13,000 (Jul07)

R&D related institutions (mostly research centers): +4,500 (Jul07)

Web indicators Only institutions withan independent web domain

univname.edu not hosting.edu/univname (except Helsinki University)

Data from search engines (web visibility intermediaries)

Indicators used in the calculation of the combined indicator WR


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METHODOLOGY

Normalization

log (na+1) N: search engine (Google, Yahoo, Live, Exalead)

Na= ----------------------------- a: web domain

log (max(ni)+1)

Median method (Size)

Sa= * ((Ga + Ya + La +Ea) max (Ga,Ya,La,Ea) - min (Ga,Ya,La,Ea))

Rich files

Ra= PDFa+ DOCa + PPTa + Psa

Ranking

Sa -> Ra(S)

Ra -> Ra(R) Va -> Ra(V) 1:1 WR= (4*V) + (2*S+1*R+1*Sc)

Sca -> Ra(Sc)


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EXPECTED RESULTS

North America

Stanford University (1st region & world), MIT (2nd), University of California,Berkeley (3th) and Harvard University (4th)

University of Toronto (28th world)

Europe Cambridge (1st region), Oxford (2nd), Zurich (3rd)

Asia/Pacific

Tokyo (59th world), Australian National (60th), National Taiwan (96th), NewSouth Wales (112th), Kyoto (116th) and Beijing (120th) universities

Latin America Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico (68th world)

Universidade de Sao Paulo (128th world)

100 200 500 1000

.PDF 38400 25500 10200 3980

.DOC 6600 4530 2480 1330

.PPT 2460 1600 699 338

.PS 2520 1120 214 33

SCHOLAR 6560 3890 1370 438

Number of files in rank


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UNEXPECTED RESULTS

Up

PennsylvaniaState University (5th world) CiteSeer, index of computerand information science papers

University of Wisconsin, Madison (8th world)

Internet Scout Project

Linkoping University (8th Europe, 62nd world)

Lysator, the Academic ComputerSociety

Universitat Trier (9th

Europe, 64th

world) DBLP, ComputerScience Bibliography

Down Cornell University (7th world)

Arxiv (www.arxiv.org, not under cornell.edu)

Yale University (35th world)

Princeton University (38th

world) California Institute of Technology (42th world)

Jet Propulsion Laboratory (jpl.nasa.gov, not under caltech.edu)

Johns Hopkins University (72th world)

School of Medicine (hopkinsmedicine.org, not under jhu.edu)


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BAD PRACTICES


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100 200 500 1000

AFRICA 47 1 5 514

ASIA 45 2 8 33 101 3,474Japan 1 3 12 37 579

China 1 5 20 897

Taiwan 1 1 7 16 88

OCEANIA 8 1 6 17 34 98

Australia 1 6 15 28 53

EUROPE 52 20 65 222 407 3,966

Germany 4 20 52 70 371

United Kingdom 4 11 39 67 226

France 12 41 576

LATINAMERICA 33 1 2 9 25 2,796

Brazil 1 5 13 1,591

NORTH AMERICA 6 76 119 218 428 2,195

USA 68 104 191 389 1,996

Canada 8 15 27 39 195

WORLD 191 100 200 500 1000 13,043

REGIONS/COUNTRIESTOP POSITIONS

TOTAL


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COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS: TOP 200


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COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS: TOP 500


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ACADEMIC DIGITAL DIVIDE

Number of universities by country in the Top 200 of the Webometrics Ranking (July 2007)


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REGIONAL DISTRIBUTION

Number of universities by region in the Webometrics Ranking (July 2007)


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LESSONS

Webometrics is the only academic ranking that provides indicators for

universities worldwide and not only the World- Class ones

Information provided could be useful to increase the commitment to

electronic publication, guiding the Web policies and therefore

improving Web presence and visibility

Web rank is probably highly related to the global level of activities,prestige and overall performance of the university

Web indicators are not able to discriminate relative contributions but

they are a reliable and feasible way to describe the full picture

Results shown that there is an unexpected academic digital divide as topEuropean and Japanese universities appear in delayed positions when

comparing with their North American counterparts


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THANKYOU!QUESTIONS?

ISIDRO F. AGUILLO, JOS L. ORTEGA, MARIO FERNNDEZ

CYBERMETRICS LABCINDOC-CSICJOAQUN COSTA, 2228002 MADRIDESPAA

WWW.WEBOMETRICS.INFO

E-MAIL: [email protected]

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Webometrics Ranking of World Universities