1 Isidro F. Aguillo Cybermetrics Lab (CSIC), Madrid, Spain International colloquium "Ranking and Research Assessment in Higher Education“ December 2007

2 CSIC, Spanish National Research Council The largest public research body in Spain 126 institutes devoted mainly to basic science 20% of the total annual Spanish scientific output 2 Nobel Prizes Cybermetrics Lab Research group at Center of Scientific Information and Documentation Editors of e-journal Cybermetrics EU projects EICSTES and WISER MAVIR network Consulting services to universities Staff: Coordinator, 4 PhD, 1 technician

3 Extended coverage Ranking Higher Education Institutions Worldwide Not only Universities from developing countries But also Universities in the Third World Covering all missions Not focusing only on Research Only a core of 200 (Van Raan) But also on Teaching and “Third Mission” Larger and more diverse audiences Increasing knowledge dissemination Web Publish or Perish Promoting Open Access initiatives

4 Complete scenario Many indicators Not only outputs but also inputs based Methodologically sound Multivariate non-parametric analysis Feasibility Problems with the data Availability (a few countries in EU & US, a few hundreds of universities) Comparability (lack of standards) Costs Single 7 th FP project over 1.5 MEURO

5 Web is the new scholarly communication tool For formal results Electronic journals, repositories (institutional, thematic, personal) For informal activities Teaching, community links, economic impact, institutional visibility Reflecting intangibles Web is the best showcase for University Favoring mobility of professors and alumni Reaching larger audiences at lower costs Allowing better position for international competition for human resources and funding Getting prestige and visibility in the digital world At cheaper costs

6 Primary aim is not the League Table But promoting Open Access initiatives Sensu lato Universities as producers of all kind of knowledge It is intended a similar movement to the 80’s & 90’s Publish or Perish Current situation Webometrics ranking is offering larger coverage than other similar Rankings Including developing countries’ institutions Not focusing only on research results Overall activity, visibility, impact, prestige, and quality is better reflected in the Web presence Showing interesting results Web Bad Practices Academic Digital Divide

7 Existing methods Google PageRank (link visibility based) Impact Factor, ratio 1:1 between impact and activity Indicator WR Search engines as universal web intermediaries Institution with independent web domain as unit Activity accounted by volume of web pages, number of documents in in rich files formats and papers in Scholar database Impact measured by the number of external inlinks Combining the 4 components with weights according the model Ranking the results

8 Webometrics Rank First published in From 2006, two editions (January and July) Higher education Institutions (mostly universities): +15,000 (Jan’08) R&D related institutions (mostly research centers): +4,800 (Jan’08)

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10 North America Stanford University (1st region & world), MIT (2nd), University of California, Berkeley (3th) and Harvard University (4th) University of Toronto (28th world) Europe Cambridge (1st region), Oxford (2nd), ETH Zurich (3rd) Asia/Pacific Tokyo (59th world), National Taiwan (96th), Kyoto (116th) and Beijing (120th) universities Australian National (60 th ), New South Wales (112th) Latin America Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (68th world) Universidade de Sao Paulo (128th world)

11 Up Pennsylvania State University (5 th world) CiteSeer, index of computer and information science papers University of Wisconsin, Madison (8 th world) Internet Scout Project Linkoping University (8 th Europe, 62 nd world) Lysator, the Academic Computer Society Universitat Trier (9 th Europe, 64 th world) DBLP, Computer Science Bibliography Down Cornell University (7 th world) Arxiv ( not under cornell.edu) Yale University (35 th world) Princeton University (38 th world) California Institute of Technology (42 th world) Jet Propulsion Laboratory (jpl.nasa.gov, not under caltech.edu) Johns Hopkins University (72 th world) School of Medicine (hopkinsmedicine.org, not under jhu.edu)

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14 Bad practices in web domain naming Universities with two (or three) domains Recent domain change or not fully completed Significant parts of the web contents under different domain or shared with external ones Biomedicine bias Linguistic bias Academic Digital Divide

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18 Top 200 universities in the Webometrics Ranking (July 2007)

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22 Webometrics is the only academic ranking that provides indicators for universities worldwide and not only the World- Class ones Information provided could be useful to increase the commitment to electronic publication, guiding the Web policies and therefore improving Web presence and visibility Web rank is probably highly related to the global level of activities, prestige and overall performance of the university Web indicators are not able to discriminate relative contributions but they are a reliable and feasible way to describe the full picture Results shown that there is an unexpected academic digital divide as top European and Japanese universities appear in delayed positions when comparing with their North American counterparts EU advantage is not showed in the link analysis as the academic webspace consists of mainly national groups

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