The Ranking Web of Universities, better known as Webometrics, is published twice a year by the Cybermetrics Lab, a Spanish research group. The ranking is the most inclusive of those currently published, and now covers nearly 32,000 institutions.

There are now three indicators:

• Visibility; the number of external networks linking to webpages (50% weighting)
• Transparency/Openness; the number of citations in the Google Scholar Profiles of top university researchers (10%)
• Excellence/Scholar; the number of papers in the top 10% most cited in 27 disciplines.

The top of the rankings is dominated by US and British universities led by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Oxford, and Berkeley. It is, however, noticeable that leading Asian universities do very much better for research than for impact. Shanghai Jiao Tong University is ranked 9^th for Excellence and 241^st for Impact, the National University of Singapore 22^nd and 118^th, and Seoul National University 94^th and 216^th.

Another interesting feature of Webometrics is that it can show short changes. For example, in Saudi Arabia several universities including King Saud University, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, King Khalid University, and Taif University, have risen significantly in half a year.

Source

Ranking Web of Universities