Ranking Web of Universities (Webometrics) in its limited version shows the top university in each country, is available on fig share. The full version can be obtained from the Cybermetrics Lab of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC).
These rankings are a combination of metrics that assess general web activity and research. They are currently the most inclusive of all global rankings and are published twice a year. The current edition includes 32,149 institutions.
The overall rank is based on three metrics:
- Visibility: number of external inlinks from different networks to main university domain, derived from Majestic (50% weighting)
- Excellence: Number of top 10% cited papers in 27 disciplines in 2020-2024, derived from Scimago (40%)
- Openness: Number of citations 2021-2025 of institutions with RoR identifier, derived from OpenAlex (10%).
Note that OpenAlex has replaced Google Scholar as the source of data for citations.
These rankings show that nearly half of the world’s universities are found in Asia, excluding the Arab World. However, the top of the table is dominated by North America and Europe, with 56 and 23 universities respectively in the top 100, which also included 14 from Asia, 6 from Australia, I from Latin America, but none from the Arab World or Africa.
Although the United States dominates the overall rankings, this is due to its strong performance for Visibility. Chinese universities now lead for Excellence and Openness.
The top five universities for each indicatory are:
Visibility;
1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
2. Harvard University, USA
3. Stanford University, USA
4. University of California, USA
5. Cornell University, USA
Excellence;
1. Harvard University, USA
2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
3. Tsinghua University, China
4. Zhejiang University, China
5. Peking University, China
Openness;
1. Harvard University, USA
2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
3. University College London, UK
4. Tsinghua University, China
5. Zhejiang University, China.
Source:
figshare