The Ranking Web of Universities, better known as Webometrics, is published twice a yuear by Cybermetrics Lab, a research group of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Higher Council of Scientific Research) in Madrid. It is the most inclusive of all the rankings, comprising over 30,000 institutions.
There are currently three indicators:
Visibility; external networks linking to webpages (50% weighting)
Transparency (Openness); Citations from the top 310 public profiles in Google Scholar minus the top 20 (10% weighting)
Excellence (Scholar); number of papers in the top 10% most coted in 27 disciplines, data collected by Scimago (40% weighting).
The upper levels of the rankings continue to be dominated by the United States, with Harvard in first place followed by Stanford and MIT. Chinese universities continue to rise with Tsinghua University in 21st place overall and Peking University in 24th. It is noticeable that Chinese universities do much better in the Excellence (research) indicator than in the other two. In the former, Tsinghua, Peking and Zhejiang Universities are respectively ranked third, ninth and sixth.
Latin America is still dominated by Brazil which holds six of the top ten places, and the African continent by South Africa and Egypt. In the Middle East Israel is now challenged by Saudi Arabia and Japan. In the European Union, smaller Northern countries, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, do very well.
Universities in Mainland China and the Chinese diaspora are among the best in Asia while the number of South and Central Asian institutions in the top 1,000 is still very low.
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