Since 2004, the Ranking Web (or Webometrics Ranking) is published twice a year (data is collected during the first weeks of January and July for being public at the end of both months), covering more than 20,000 Higher Education Institutions worldwide.

     We intend to motivate both institutions and scholars to have a web presence that reflect accurately their activities. 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. If you need further clarification regarding the motivations of the Ranking or the methodology, please read the FAQ.

The ALL NEW January 2012 edition

     As part of our commitment to improve the quality of the Ranking we adopted several relevant changes for the current edition. Perhaps the most relevant has been the merging of the Directory into the Ranking, so now we provide ranks for all the Higher Education Institutions (over 20,000!).

     The web presence and visibility are probably the best proxies for describing the overall performance of the Universities in the 21st century, and possibly they are also the only ones able to classify all of them in a confident way.

     The major changes in the methodology are described below. We prepare a full revamping of the methodology section in the next weeks, with further details and explanations. Published figures are RANKS (lower is better), intended for showing individual performances, but they are not the values used in the calculations.

     Link analysis is a major component of our composite index. Unfortunately not the successful PageRank, the Google algorithm, nor the numbers of backlinks provided by the now defunct Yahoo Site Explorer are publicly available, so a new data provider was required.

     The visibility is obtained from combining external inlinks and referred domains according to Majestic SEO (50%).

     The new system penalizes more strongly certain web domain naming practices like using several central domains, sharing domains with other organizations (helsinki.fi, spb.ru, irk.ru, kursk.ru, omsk.ru, wroc.pl, poznan.pl, krakow.pl, lublin.pl, gda.pl, kiev.ua, kharkov.ua, nic.in, ernet.in, gomel.by, vitebsk.by, mogilev.by, rnu.tn, refer.org, jx.cn, bremen.de, niedersachsen.de, archi.fr, trieste.it, sld.cu) or recent name changes. We discourage to use alternative domains for the international oriented web sites or for the contents in foreign languages.

     Regarding the activity indicator, the Scimago number of scientific papers is included again in the global calculation, increasing significantly its weighting. Due to the different problems with the stability of most the public search engines, it was decided finally that only Google will be used as the source for all these indicators:

• Size: Total number of web pages (by Google), excluding the rich files (10%)
• Rich files: The sum of the following file types(by Google): pdf, doc+docx, ppt+ppts and ps+eps (10%)
  
• Scholar: The combination of the number of papers in Google Scholar for the period 2007-2011 with the number of papers (2003-2010) collected by the Scimago group (30%).

Inclusion and exclusion criteria     

     Our inclusion policy has not changed: Only universities with an independent web domain are considered (exceptions being Universities of Helsinki and Oulu).

     If one institution has more than one main domain, we analyze all of them but only the best ranked is published, even if this domain is not the new (current) or the preferred one.

There are three main motivations for exclusion, related to cheating attempts, other unethical behavior or illegal practices:

• Organizations hosting forums or related websites promoting (directly mentioning or through advertisements or by linking) of porn, online gambling, steroids, hate groups, products that help people pass drug tests, sites that promote academic plagiarism or cheating, counterfeit products, data entry affiliates, dialers, drugs, drug paraphernalia, e-gold, products made from endangered species, escort services, fake documents, hacking, miracle cures, prostitution, phishing scams or similar services, products or activities.
• The new legislation prohibits us from linking websites that have deposits of large amounts of copyright-infringed documents (including papers authored by scholars not belonging to the hosting university).
• Also it will be excluded those websites receiving a huge number of paid-links from non-academic sources, including bogus .edu domains.

     Please check the Notes section for explanation about the numbers in brackets.

Contact Us

     As usual we already thank you for your comments that you can send to our e-mail address. Please, note that we do not discuss specific figures and we do not answer commercial or anonymous requests (@yahoo, @gmail, @hotmail, etc).

     Please take into account that the section Previous Editions is the repository of the current and previous editions' excel files (xls) for the Top 500 universities that can be used freely citing the source. Sorry, no larger or previous years' files are available.