Webometric ranking of world universities - January 2012

CSIS - Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, the largest public research body in Spain -published last week the new ranking of open access repositories.

The original aim of the Ranking was to promote Web publication. Supporting Open Access initiatives, electronic access to scientific publications and to other academic material are our primary targets. However web indicators are very useful for ranking purposes too as they are not based on number of visits or page design but on the global performance and visibility of the universities.

Four indicators were obtained from the quantitative results provided by the main search engines as follows:
  • Size (S). Number of pages recovered from Google (10%)
  • Visibility (V). The number of external links received (inlinks) multiplied by the referring domins for these inlinks, according to Majestic SEO historical data (50%).
  • Rich Files (R). After evaluation of their relevance to academic and publication activities and considering the volume of the different file formats, the following were selected: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf), Adobe PostScript (.ps & .eps), Microsoft Word (.doc & .docx) and Microsoft Powerpoint (.ppt & .pptx). These data were extracted using Google (10%).
  • Scholar (Sc). The data is a combination of items published between 2007 and 2011 included in Google Scholar and the global output (2003-2010) obtained from Scimago SIR (30%).

IMT obtained the 75° position in the Italian ranking  (a total of 211 universities/institutions).

This is not a bad result if you consider the we are a very young institution and our Institutional Repository is only 1 year old.

Anyway we can improve the position by following the "best practices" suggested by CSIS. I only want to underline the most important to me:

Contents: Create
 A large web presence is made possible only with the efforts of a large group of authors. The best way to do this is to encourage and support a large number of your scholars, researchers or graduate students as potential authors.
A distributed system of authoring can be operative at several levels:
 Central organisation can be responsible for the design guidelines and institutional information

 Libraries, documentation centres and similar services can be responsible for large databases that includes bibliographic ones, but also large repositories (thesis, pre-prints, and reports)

 Individual persons or teams should maintain their own websites, enriching them with self archiving practices.

You can find the complete rankings (world, by countries, by typology) here.

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