21st Anniversary Edition (2004-2024)

First edition of 2024 with RoR institutional identifiers

         The January edition (2024.1) is built with the indicators obtained during this month in order to maintain the freshness of the data of the most current and updated Ranking of Universities.

         This text is the most updated info about the ranking's methodology. It always supersedes the contents provided in the general Methodology. It is also relevant the info provided in the Notes section.

RoR

          Our declared aim is to promote OpenAccess and Open Science and in that scenario it is important to have very good institutional identifiers. We have decided to support RoR initiative, using RoR identifiers in our database. Unfortunately not every higher education institution has an ID yet with RoR, so we strongly recommend to register and use this identifier.

          Please, contact directly with RoR for updating and correcting data. We will use its database in future editions.

         The data from the Research Organization Registry is made available under a CC0 licence .

Contact Info

         IMPORTANT: Please, do NOT send anonymous requests using email accounts such gmail.com, yahoo.com or hotmail.com. We are not going to answer any of these messages. Twitter requests are not accepted.

         If you wish contact to EDITOR, my email address is [email protected]. You can check my experience and expertise about these topics accessing the scientific papers I authored as described in my Google Scholar Citations profile or in my OA repository profile.

         We warmly thank information about BAD PRACTICES, but we do not discuss specific ranks or comment on comparative results with other HEIs

         We devoted time for preparing this site contents explaining the ranking and its methodology. Please, as a courtesy, READ our texts before asking trivial questions already answered in this website.

Info provided here supersedes the contents provided in Methodology

          Please, take into account that the following information:

          - Spanish edition is no longer updated. Please refer to the English version.

          - Exclusion of universities is reserved for diploma-mills, fake or doubtful institutions. Our decisions regarding not inclusion are final and we do not make any email exchange about these issues. However the absence of an institution could be due to an error, so please send to us information about the gaps or mistakes.

          - Universities without full 24/7 webservers availability are excluded. Our criteria are not to rank those universities failing to answer our ping requests from our facilities to their servers during two consecutive month requests.

          - As previously informed, we also changed our policy regarding the universities with two or more central web domains, a bad practice that it is going to be even more penalized than before. Until now, all the main web domains of the university were ranked, but only the one with the better web indicators was published, even if this was the old or the not-preferred one in the central homepage. This procedure is still applied when both domains maintain their independence, but if the old domain redirects to the new one, this will be the one ranked and published. As expected, this is having strong (negative) impact on a few universities.

Changes in the calculation of indicators

         Published figures are RANKS (lower is better), intended for showing individual performances, but they are not the values used in the calculations. Due to technical issues several key changes (marked in red) have been done, so the following table describes the current methodology:

INDICATORS MEANING METHODOLOGY SOURCE WEIGHT
PRESENCE    This indicator has been discontinued    
VISIBILITY Web contents Impact  Number of external networks (subnets) linking to the institution's webpages (normalized averaged value is chosen). Check the Notes section about bad practices  Ahrefs
 Majestic
50%
TRANSPARENCY
(or OPENNESS)
Top cited researchers  Number of citations from Top 310 authors (excluding the first 20)
See Transparent Ranking for additional info, specially the reasons for exclusion
 Google Scholar
 Profiles
10%
EXCELLENCE
(or SCHOLAR)
Top cited
papers
 Number of papers amongst the top 10% most cited in each one of the all 27 disciplines of the full database
  Data for the five year period: 2018-2022
  Scimago 40%

PLEASE READ: A few practical facts about the Ranking

          Since 2004, the Ranking Web (or Webometrics Ranking) is published twice a year (data is collected during the first weeks of January and July for being public at the end of both months), covering more than 32 000 Higher Education Institutions worldwide. We intend to motivate both institutions and scholars to have a web presence that reflect accurately their activities. If the web performance of an institution is below the expected position according to their academic excellence, university authorities should reconsider their web, open access and transparency policy, promoting substantial increases of the volume and quality of their electronic publications.

        Data is collected between 1 and 20 of January or July, depending of the edition. Each variable is obtained at least two times during that period and the maximum value is chosen for discarding mistakes or errors. Volatility of search engines is very high, so figures can be different and not easily replicated if the search is performed days later. Google info is very geographically biased, so for our purposes the data are collected using the google.com mirror domain, English as language of the interface and Madrid (Spain) as location.

        Final publication is done about the END of January or July, usually not before the 28th. We reserve the right to correct minor errors, mainly those related to the names of institutions, but also specific problems with the data. As a general rule we do not discuss any figure or provide the raw values supporting specific ranks.

Bad practices

          The Webometrics Rank of a university is strongly linked to the volume and quality of the contents it publishes on the Web.

          During the last years we discovered and fight unethical practices intending to manipulate (improving) the ranks of certain universities. In many cases these bad practices are so serious that local authorities should be called,. Results for Visibility are showed AS THEY ARE COLLECTED and if you suspect any wrongdoing, please contact with the university head, local or national authorities and/or journalists.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

          This work has been done in the IPP in the facilities of the CCHS-CSIC and it has been possible thanks to an intramural project funded by the CSIC and the help of the Área de Informática Científica de la Secretaría General Adjunta de Informática SGAI-CSIC (Clara Cala, Jacinto Vera, Laura Barrios y Ali Adib. Special thanks to Celso Delgado.