The Webometrics Ranking of World Universities (www.webometrics.info
<http://www.webometrics.info>) has been updated with data collected during January 2008. The main new service offered is the Ranking of Repositories that presents the best 200 ones of the world. The best ranked are three largest thematic Open Access deposits: Arxiv, dedicated to physics and related sciences; RePEc, a big effort being made by the economic science world; and E-LIS committed to Library and Information Sciences and Documentation.
The ranking still show a concerning academic digital divide between North American universities and the European ones, as almost the 60% of the 200 first positions are occupied by North American universities. On the first positions of the ranking are MIT, Stanford and Harvard universities. The University of Cambridge, which goes down the list until 27th position, continues being the first European university that appears in the ranking followed by Oxford and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Zurich. It is also worth to mention the good results obtained in general by the Canadian universities that maintains several institutions very well positioned.
Nordic universities like Helsinki and Uppsala universities continue to improving their positions in the ranking. And also the universities of Geneva, Amsterdam and Leipzig show an interesting progress.
Australian National University in Oceania and UNAM from Mexico in Latin America are improving their positions as regional leaders but they are also close to world leaders status.
Another interesting result observed is the improvement that Japanese universities are experimenting. Tokyo and Kyoto universities are increasing their position in the ranking which reflects the commitment of these institutions to web publishing. Also, it is worth to mention the progress that some Chinese universities like the National Taiwan University, and the University of Hong Kong and the Chinese University of Hong Kong are doing.
Regarding Research Councils there is also a predominance of North American organizations, like the NIH and NASA in the 2 first positions, but the European CNRS, Max Planck and CERN are among the top ten positions in our ranking.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: higher education, university rankings
Yes, webometrics is really useful but I don’t understand why using web domains that include more than a single university. It’s the case of “campus Jussieu”. I arrive at a closed page and 3 links. I don’t think it’s normal to have university-conglomerates on webometrics.