The first beta version of the new Ranking Web of Hospitals is already available. Comments and suggestions about this new Ranking are welcomed.

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.

International Workshop on University Web Rankings

The workshop devoted to the "Best practices in the design of the Web presence of academic institutions" took place in March 13th, 2008 in CSIC facilities in Madrid. The slides of the Seminar and Workshops are available here.

Changes in the January 2008 edition

These are the major changes introduced in this new edition:

- Full coverage of US Higher Education Institutions, including now 2-year Colleges accounting for an extra 2000 entries.

- A completely new Repositories Ranking according to the webometrics criteria for classifying all the institutional and thematic repositories with an autonomous web domain or subdomain.

- A minor change in the ranking formula, using now percentages for indicating the weights in order to make more comparable with the criteria used by other rankings. The new percentages increase the relative contribution of rich files and Scholar papers, decreasing the weight of the number of web pages.

- A new section marked Notes is providing information about institutions with bad naming practices, including duplicate domains. If after the name of the university appears a number this one refers to this section for detailed comments.

- Following the previous edition practice, the duplicate entries in the Ranking are deleted, but now the best positioned domain is used even if this is not longer the official one (Imperial College).

A summary of the current results (January 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:

As usual we will thank your comments if you address them to our MAILBOX.