Since 2004, the Ranking Web is published two times (January & July) per year. This ranking has the largest coverage with more than 16,000 Higher Education Institutions worldwide listed in the Directory. 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.

Major changes

We have adopted a new naming policy using lowercases for the listed sites in order to improve readability. We are working on adding or correcting the lost special characters and accents, so we kindly ask for your patience in the meantime.

The database has been completely revised and updated with about 3,000 entries added or corrected, including English names for all the universities of Poland. If you see that your institution is not already listed, please feel free to send us an email so we can add it to the updated version.

A new "region" has been introduced that it is called Arab World (dz, bh, km, dj, eg, er, iq, jo, kw, lb, ly, mr, ma, om, ps, qa, sa, so, sd, sy, tn, ae, ye), which is meant to cover the Middle East (excluding Iran which is now transferred to Asia) and North Africa.

Regarding ranking methodology, the Scholar indicator has been recalculated, so it is now obtained from the mean between total figures and those for the period 2001-2008. Due to some technical problems the G-factor for the first 1,000 universities is not yet taken into account for the visibility indicator, but we intend to use it in the next edition.

Regarding bad practices

The use of link farms and paid backlinks to improve the position in our Webometrics Rankings is not aceptable as this is a non academic practice and it is contrary to the aims of this Ranking. The involved institutions does not have a place in our Ranking and will not be classified in future editions. Random checks are made to ensure the correcteness of the data obtained.

Notes

The section called Notes is providing information about institutions with bad naming practices, including duplicate domains. If a number appears after the name of the university you will find the corresponding detailed comments at the Notes section

Results

A summary of the current results (July 2008) sorted by country is presented in the following table. For each country the first 10 and 5 universities have been chosen and then they have been ranked by the sum of the positions of these universities:

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