Webometric ranking of world universities: Introduction, methodology, and future developments

Abstract

Today the worldwide web (web) is one of the main sources of information and the main showcase for everyone (institutions, business enterprises, individuals, etc.) who wants to be recognized on in the 'real world'. At the academic level, universities have a very important role as a means to communicate scientific and cultural achievements. Web publication by scholars is not only a tool for scholarly communication but it is also a means to reach larger audiences and in general a reflection of the performance of the institutions. There have been several efforts to develop web indicators that can ultimately lead to build a university's rankings. This paper presents the Webometric Ranking of World Universities which is built using a combined indicator called WR that takes into account the number of published web pages (S) (twenty-five percent), the number of rich files, those in pdf, ps, doc and ppt format (R) (12.5 percent), the number of articles gathered from the Google Scholar Database (Sc) (12.5 percent,) and the total number of external inlinks (V) (fifty percent). The results show that there is a larger than expected academic digital divide between higher education institutions in the United States and those in the European Union. This kind of rankings using web indicators should be used to measure universities' performance in conjunction with more traditional academic indicators.