[Web4lib] Ranking Web of Universities: July 2009 edition

[Isidro F. Aguillo]

The July edition of the Ranking Web of World Universities 
(http://www.webometrics.info) shows important news. Most of them are due 
to changes done to improve the academic impact of the open web contents 
and to reduce the geographical bias of search engines. As a result, the 
US universities still lead the Ranking (MIT with its huge Open 
Courseware is again the first, followed by Harvard, Stanford and 
Berkeley), but the digital gap with their European counterparts 
(Cambridge and Oxford are in the region’s top) has been reduced. Even 
more important, some of the developing countries institutions reach high 
ranks, especially in Latin America where the University of Sao Paulo 
(38th) and UNAM (44th) benefits from the increasingly interconnected 
Brazilian and Mexican academic webspaces.

Several countries improves their performance including Taiwan and Saudi 
Arabia with strong web oriented strategies, Czech Republic (Charles), 
the leader for Eastern Europe, Spain (Complutense) and Portugal (Minho, 
Porto) with huge repositories and strong Open Access initiatives. Norway 
(NTNU, Oslo), Egypt could be also mentioned.

On the other side, the underrated are headed by France, with a very 
fragmented system, Korea, whose student-oriented websites are frequently 
duplicated, New Zealand, India or Argentina.

Africa is still monopolized by South African universities (Cape Town is 
the first, 405th), as well as Australian Universities are the best 
ranked for Oceania (Australian National University, 77th)

Other well performing institutions include Cornell or Caltech in the 
USA, Tokyo (24th) Toronto (28th), Hong Kong (91st), or Peking (104th). 
On the contrary, in positions below expected we find Yale, Princeton, 
Saint Petersburg, Seoul and the Indian Institutes of Science or Technology.

Check out also:

Ranking Web of Research Centers http://research.webometrics.info/
Ranking Web of Repositories http://repositories.webometrics.info/
Ranking Web of Hospitals http://hospitals.webometrics.info/
Ranking Web of Business Schools http://business-schools.webometrics.info/

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Isidro F. Aguillo, HonPhD
Cybermetrics Lab
CCHS - CSIC
Albasanz, 26-28, 3C1. 28037 Madrid. Spain

Ph. 91-602 2890. Fax: 91-602 2971

isidro.aguillo @ cchs.csic.es
www. webometrics.info
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