The latest edition of the Ranking Web of Universities, usually known as Webometrics, has been released. It is now in its twentieth year of publication and combines web activity and research measures. It is published twice a year by the Cybermetrics Lab of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Spain and is the most inclusive global ranking and now includes over 32,000 institutions.

The current methodology is based on three metrics:

Visibility: number of backlinks linking to webpages, data derived from Ahrefs and Majestic (50% weighting)

Transparency (or Openness); Citations from the top 310 authors (excluding the first 20), data derived from Google Scholar Profiles (10% weighting)

Excellence (or Scholar); Papers among the 10% most cited in 27 disciplines, data provided by Scimago (10% weighting).

The current edition shows a noticeable difference between the scores for the three indicators. Chinese, and to a lesser extent British and French, universities do much better for Excellence than for Impact. Tsinghua University is 3^rd in the world for excellence but 106^th for impact, Imperial College London is 15^th for Excellence and 96^th for Impact, and Université Paris Saclay is 57^th for Excellence and 665^th for Impact.

Overall, Harvard is in first place in this edition, followed by Stanford. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Oxford, and the University of Michigan.

The top five institutions for Visibility are:

1. MIT
2. Harvard University
3. Stanford University
4. University of California Berkeley
5. Cornell University.

The top five institutions for Transparency are:

1. Harvard University
2. Stanford University
3. MIT
4. University of California Berkeley
5. University of Oxford

The top five institutions for Excellence are:

1. Harvard University
2. University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
3. Tsinghua University
4. Stanford University
5. University of Oxford.

Source

Ranking Web of Universities