Ranking web of universities: Is webometrics a reliable academic ranking?

Abstract

Global university rankings continue to gain growing interest and have high visibility from all stakeholders. Of these, Webometrics Ranking (WR) faces many criticisms about its function. Some people believe WR evaluates only the universities’ websites but not their global performance and impact, as WR authors mentioned. This stimulates us to examine the idea of using WR as a reliable academic ranking for world universities. We apply the WR results with two widely accepted indexes to test this hypothesis, i.e., the global university rankings and the bibliometrics. Therefore, the WR ranking of the Top 100 institutions is correlated with the corresponding values of six world ranking systems’ 2015 edition (ARWU, USNWR, QS, THE, NTU, and URAP) that commonly accepted to evaluate the academic performance of the university, as well as with the objectively bibliometric indicators gathered from the Web of Science (WOS) In Cites™-Thomson Reuters. The findings revealed that the WR results provide a good correlation with both ranking systems’ results and with 12 bibliometric variables, namely: WOS Documents, Times Cited, Citation Impact (CI), Citation Impact: Category Normalized (CNCI), Citation Impact: Journal Normalized (JNCI), Impact Relative to World, Percent of Top 1% Documents, Percent of Top 10% Documents, Highly Cited Papers, h-index, International Collaborations, and Percent Industry Collaborations. WR and the studied six rankings’ consistency increases with increasing the weight percent of the research or bibliometric indicators in these six global rankings. Moreover, the consistency between WR and survey-based rankings (USNWR, THE, and QS) increases with decreasing the weight of subjective reputation survey indicators. The extremely high visibility characterizes the North American, especially USA universities in WR and the studied seven global rankings. Thus, web-based indicators ranking (WR) offers comparable and similar quality to those of the six major global university rankings. Accordingly, they can rank institutional academic performance. Moreover, the reliability could be enhanced if each university has only one web-domain that accurately reflects its actual performance and activity.We recommend all institutions apply all ranking systems together since their criteria and indicators complement each other and form a comprehensive index for covering various HEIs activities or functions worldwide.