Isidro F. Aguillo

Comparing university rankings

Recently there is increasing interest in university rankings. Annual rankings of world universities are published by QS for the Times Higher Education Supplement, the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the Higher Education and Accreditation Council of Taiwan and rankings based on Web visibility by the Cybermetrics Lab at CSIC. In this paper we compare the rankings using a set of similarity measures. For the rankings that are being published for a number of years we also examine longitudinal patterns. The rankings limited to European universities are compared to the ranking of the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University. The findings show that there are reasonable similarities between the rankings, even though each applies a different methodology. The biggest differences are between the rankings provided by the QS-Times Higher Education Supplement and the Ranking Web of the CSIC Cybermetrics Lab. The highest similarities were observed between the Taiwanese and the Leiden rankings from European universities. Overall the similarities are increased when the comparison is limited to the European universities.

Is Google Scholar useful for bibliometrics? A webometric analysis

Google Scholar, the academic bibliographic database provided free-of-charge by the search engine giant Google, has been suggested as an alternative or complementary resource to the commercial citation databases like Web of Knowledge (ISI/Thomson) or Scopus (Elsevier). In order to check the usefulness of this database for bibliometric analysis, and especially research evaluation, a novel approach is introduced. Instead of names of authors or institutions, a webometric analysis of academic web domains is performed. The bibliographic records for 225 top level web domains (TLD), 19,240 university and 6,380 research centres institutional web domains have been collected from the Google Scholar database. About 63.8% of the records are hosted in generic domains like .com or .org, confirming that most of the Scholar data come from large commercial or non-profit sources. Considering only institutions with at least one record, one-third of the other items (10.6% from the global) are hosted by the 10,442 universities, while 3,901 research centres amount for an additional 7.9% from the total. The individual analysis show that universities from China, Brazil, Spain, Taiwan or Indonesia are far better ranked than expected. In some cases, large international or national databases, or repositories are responsible for the high numbers found. However, in many others, the local contents, including papers in low impact journals, popular scientific literature, and unpublished reports or teaching supporting materials are clearly overrepresented. Google Scholar lacks the quality control needed for its use as a bibliometric tool; the larger coverage it provides consists in some cases of items not comparable with those provided by other similar databases.

Webometric Ranking of World Universities: Introduction, Methodology, and Future Developments

Today the worldwide web (web) is one of the main sources of information and the main showcase for everyone (institutions, business enterprises, individuals, etc.) who wants to be recognized on in the ‘real world’. At the academic level, universities have a very important role as a means to communicate scientific and cultural achievements. Web publication by scholars is not only a tool for scholarly communication but it is also a means to reach larger audiences and in general a reflection of the performance of the institutions. There have been several efforts to develop web indicators that can ultimately lead to build a universitys rankings. This paper presents the Webometric Ranking of World Universities which is built using a combined indicator called WR that takes into account the number of published web pages (S) (twenty‐five percent), the number of rich files, those in pdf, ps, doc and ppt format (R) (12.5 percent), the number of articles gathered from the Google Scholar Database (Sc) (12.5 percent,)...

Do highly cited researchers successfully use the social web

Academics can now use the web and the social websites to disseminate scholarly information in a variety of different ways. Although some scholars have taken advantage of these new online opportunities, it is not clear how widespread their uptake is or how much impact they can have. This study assesses the extent to which successful scientists have social web presences, focusing on one influential group: highly cited researchers working at European institutions. It also assesses the impact of these presences. We manually and systematically identified if the European highly cited researchers had profiles in Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, Mendeley, Academia and LinkedIn or any content in SlideShare. We then used URL mentions and altmetric indicators to assess the impact of the web presences found. Although most of the scientists had an institutional website of some kind, few had created a profile in any social website investigated, and LinkedIn—the only non-academic site in the list—was the most popular. Scientists having one kind of social web profile were more likely to have another in many cases, especially in the life sciences and engineering. In most cases it was possible to estimate the relative impact of the profiles using a readily available statistic and there were disciplinary differences in the impact of the different kinds of profiles. Most social web profiles had some evidence of uptake, if not impact; nevertheless, the value of the indicators used is unclear.

Mapping world-class universities on the web

A visual display of the most important universities in the world is the aim of this paper. It shows the topological characteristics and describes the web relationships among universities of different countries and continents. The first 1000 higher education institutions from the Ranking Web of World Universities were selected and their link relationships were obtained from Yahoo! Search. Network graphs and geographical maps were built from the search engine data. Social network analysis techniques were used to analyse and describe the structural properties of the whole of the network and its nodes. The results show that the world-class university network is constituted from national sub-networks that merge in a central core where the principal universities of each country pull their networks toward international link relationships. The United States dominates the world network, and within Europe the British and the German sub-networks stand out.

Visibility of collaboration on the Web

The emerging influence of new information and communication technologies (ICT) on collaboration in science and technology has to be considered. In particular, the question of the extent to which collaboration in science and in technology is visible on the Web needs examining. Thus the purpose of this study is to examine whether broadly similar results would occur if solely Web data was used rather than all available bibliometric co-authorship data. For this purpose a new approach of Web visibility indicators of collaboration is examined. The ensemble of COLLNET members is used to compare co-authorship patterns in traditional bibliometric databases and the network visible on the Web. One of the general empirical results is a high percentage (78%) of all bibliographic multi- authored publications become visible through search of engines in the Web. One of the special studies has shown Web visibility of collaboration is dependent on the type of bibliographic multi-authored papers. The social network analysis (SNA) is applied to comparisons between bibliographic and Web collaboration networks. Structure formation processes in bibliographic and Web networks are studied. The research question posed is to which extent collaboration structures visible in the Web change their shape in the same way as bibliographic collaboration networks over time. A number of special types of changes in bibliographic and Web structures are explained.

Maps of the academic web in the European Higher Education Area - an exploration of visual web indicators

This paper shows maps of the web presence of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) on the level of universities using hyperlinks and analyses the topology of the European academic network. Its purpose is to combine methods from Social Network Analysis (SNA) and cybermetric techniques in order to ask for tendencies of integration of the European universities visible in their web presence and the role of different universities in the process of the emergence of an European Research Area. We find as a main result that the European network is set up by the aggregation of well-defined national networks, whereby the German and British networks are dominant. The national networks are connected to each other through outstanding national universities in each country.

Indicators for a webometric ranking of open access repositories

The Ranking Web of World Repositories (http://repositories.webometrics.info) is introduced. The objective is to promote Open access initiatives (OAI) supporting the use of repositories for scientific evaluation purposes. A set of metrics based on web presence, impact and usage is discussed. The Ranking is built on indicators obtained from web search engines following a model close to the Impact Factor one. The activity accounts for a 50% of the index, including number of pages, pdf files and items in Google Scholar database, while the visibility takes into account the external inlinks received by the repository (the other 50%). The Ranking provides the Top 300 repositories from a total of 592 worldwide, with a strong presence of US, German and British institutional repositories and the leadership of the large subject repositories. Results suggest the need to take into consideration other file formats and the usage information, an option is not feasible today.

Visualization of the Nordic academic web: Link analysis using social network tools

The aim of this paper is to study the link relationships in the Nordic academic web space - comprised of 23 Finnish, 11 Danish and 28 Swedish academic web domains with the European one. Through social networks analysis we intend to detect sub-networks within the Nordic network, the position and role of the different university web domains and to understand the structural topology of this web space. Co-link analysis, with asymmetrical matrices and cosine measure, is used to identify thematic clusters. Results show that the Nordic network is a cohesive network, set up by three well-defined sub-networks and it rests on the Finnish and Swedish sub-networks. We conclude that the Danish network has less visibility than other Nordic countries. The Swedish one is the principal Nordic sub-network and the Finland network is a slightly isolated from Europe, with the exception of the University of Helsinki.

Measuring the institution's footprint in the web

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an alternative, although complementary, system for the evaluation of the scholarly activities of academic organizations, scholars and researchers, based on web indicators, in order to speed up the change of paradigm in scholarly communication towards a new fully electronic twenty‐first century model.Design/methodology/approach – In order to achieve these goals, a new set of web indicators has been introduced, obtained mainly from data gathered from search engines, the new mediators of scholarly communication.Findings – It was found that three large groups of indicators are feasible to obtain and relevant for evaluation purposes: activity (web publication); impact (visibility) and usage (visits and visitors). As a proof of concept, a Ranking Web of Universities has been built with Webometrics data. There are two relevant findings: ranking results are similar to those obtained by other bibliometric‐based rankings; and there is a concerning digital divide bet...