TRANSPARENT RANKING: Top Universities by Citations in Top Google Scholar profiles

Twelfth Edition (July 2021 version 12.0.3).

          Following the request of many universities, we decided not to use temporally the Google Scholar Citations (GSC) institutional profiles in this edition. GS is still working for extending their coverage, but unfortunately their resources are limited and there is no final date for finishing the task. The number of profiles is over 5000, but it is far for covering our full directory. We are still committed to the use that key source, but in the meantime we are collecting citations for the lists obtained from filtering GSC profiles by the (main and only the main) institutional web domains used in the Ranking Web (email domains in GSC).

PLEASE READ THIS INFORMATION FIRST

          The data, as in previous editions, is still in BETA, but when cleaned it will be used as the Transparent (Openness) indicator of the next edition of the Ranking Web of Universities scheduled for the END OF JULY 2021. There are a few methodological changes that are very relevant:

          1. We strongly advice to use normalized (official) name of the university in the affiliation and the INSTITUTIONAL email address. We are using the domain of the email addresses for filtering the profiles and data in GS Citations. When institutional profiles get updated and enlarged we will use them instead, so it is important to standardize names and affiliations for the future.

          2. Citations from the top 210 public profiles of each university are collected. This number of profiles is for allowing size independent comparisons. The top twenty (20) profiles of the list is EXCLUDED for improving representativeness by removing outliers. For the rest of the top profiles, the number of citations are added and the institutions are ranked in descending order of this indicator.

          3. IMPORTANT: Non individual profiles (journals, departments, groups, conferences) included in the top 210 results are penalized with the EXCLUSION of the whole institution (citation count equals to zero).

          4.  BAD PRACTICES. If multiple profiles of authors not belonging to the University are added intentionally to increase its rank, the institution will be EXCLUDED of the ranking. We compile data from more than 990 000 GSC profiles, some of them are incorrect (unedited, incomplete or erroneous), but it is almost impossible for us to check all of them.

          5. The figures are valid only at the time of collection (around June 20-24, 2021) . We don`t comment on the numbers or absences. This version consist only of Top entries (citations>1000), about 4 200 institutions, but we will use non-zero values for about 2 500 additional institutions.

          6. A few universities have two main web domains, but only the best global ranked is included in the main ranking

      To set up an personal profile in Google Scholar Citations database is voluntary, but once it is made public the responsibility for info correctness belongs to the author. GSC automatically updates the profiles, that although very practical sometimes it adds non-pertinent records and citations to the profile. Authors should be aware of these issues and clean their profiles periodically. Also institutions should monitor their members profiles for intended (or unintended) fake, incorrect or duplicate records. This is key for the ranking as any institution with these problems can be excluded from future editions of the ranking. Please, contact directly with Google Scholar for any aspect related with its database or profiles.

Please contact isidro.aguillo regarding errors or corrections before the publication of the main Ranking