The repository and business school rankings corresponding to the January 2010 edition are already available at their respective web pages. The update for the university and hospital rankings will be available, hopefully, at the beginning of February.

Since 2004, the Ranking Web is published twice a year (January and July), covering more than 18,000 Higher Education Institutions worldwide. Web presence measures the activity and visibility of the institutions and it is a good indicator of impact and prestige of universities. Rank summarizes the global performance of the University, provides information for candidate students and scholars, and reflects the commitment to the dissemination of scientific knowledge.

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.

Last minute comments

During the last year several of the signatories of the Code of Good Practices known as Berlin Principles on Ranking of Higher Education Institutions became private-for-profit companies and the biases of some of the Rankings are now more and more evident. Although Webometrics Ranking formally and explicitly still adheres to the Berlin Principles, we would make some points to add to these principles:

• A World Ranking is ONE ranking: Publishing a series of completely different classifications with exactly the same data is useless and confusing.
• A World Universities Ranking is a ranking of universities from all over the world, covering thousands of them, not only a few hundred institutions from the developed world.
• A Ranking backed by a for-profit company exploiting rank-related business should be checked with care.
• Unexpected presence of certain universities in top positions is a good indicator of the (lack of) quality of a Ranking, independently on how supposedly sound methodologies are used.
• Rankings favoring stability between editions and not publishing explicitly individual changes and reasons for them (correcting errors, adding or deleting entries, changing indicators) are violating the code of good practices.
• Research only (bibliometrics) based Ranking are biased against technologies, computer science, social sciences and humanities, disciplines that usually amounts for more than half of the scholars in a standard comprehensive university.
• Rankings should include indicators, even indirect ones, about teaching mission and the so-called third mission, considering not only the scientific impact of the university activities but also the economic, social, cultural and also the political ones.
• World-class universities are not small, very specialized institutions.
• Surveys are not a suitable tool for World Rankings as there is no even a single individual with a deep (several semesters per institution), multi-institutional (several dozen), multidisciplinary (hard sciences, biomedicine, social sciences, technologies) experience in a representative sample (different continents) of universities worldwide.
• Link analysis is a far more powerful tool for quality evaluation than citation analysis that only counts formal recognition between peers, while links not only includes bibliographic citations but third parties involvement with university activities.

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