The latest edition of the Ranking Web of Universities, often known as Webometrics, has just been published by the Spanish National Research Council (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas). There are now nearly 30,000 institutions in the ranking. The current methodology of the ranking combines web-based and research criteria. The four indicators are: Presence (5% weighting), the number of pages in the main webdomain; Visibility (50%), the number of external networks linking to webpages; Transparency or Openness (10%), number of citations from the top 11-110 authors in Google Scholar Individual Profiles; Excellence or Scholar (35%), number of papers in the top 10% most cited in 26 discipline.
The January 2020 ranking has changed little over the last six months. Harvard is in first place overall and for Presence, Openness and Excellence, Stanford is second overall, and MIT is third overall and first for Impact. Russian and Turkish universities are excluded because of unauthorised Webometrics data.
The top universities in various regions are:
Latin America; Universidade de Sāo Paulo, Brazil
Europe; University of Oxford, UK
Asia and BRICS; Tsinghua University, China
Africa and CIVETS; University of Cape Town, South Africa
Arab World; King Saud University, Saudi Arabia
Oceania; University of Melbourne, Australia
Caribbean; University of Puerto Rico
Middle East; Tel Aviv University, Israel.
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