José Luis Ortega

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.

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,)...

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.

Relationship between altmetric and bibliometric indicators across academic social sites: The case of CSIC's members

This study explores the connections between social and usage metrics (altmetrics) and bibliometric indicators at the author level. It studies to what extent these indicators, gained from academic sites, can provide a proxy for research impact. Close to 10,000 author profiles belonging to the Spanish National Research Council were extracted from the principal scholarly social sites: ResearchGate, Academia.edu and Mendeley and academic search engines: Microsoft Academic Search and Google Scholar Citations. Results describe little overlapping between sites because most of the researchers only manage one profile (72%). Correlations point out that there is scant relationship between altmetric and bibliometric indicators at author level. This is due to the almetric ones are site-dependent, while the bibliometric ones are more stable across web sites. It is concluded that altmetrics could reflect an alternative dimension of the research performance, close, perhaps, to science popularization and networking abilities, but far from citation impact.

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.

Longitudinal study of content and elements in the scientific web environment

This work is a longitudinal study of the evolution and the state of 738 web sites at two different points in time (1997 and 2004). It tries to establish the rate of growth and decay of the web and all the web elements. To this end, the structure and the contents of these web sites are extracted through a crawler and compared at the two different moments in time. The main results confirm a growth of web content and elements in the web, although there is also a high degree of web content decay. The results suggest that in the seven-year period covered by this study the web is characterized by both strong dynamism and instability.

Microsoft academic search and Google scholar citations: Comparative analysis of author profiles

This article offers a comparative analysis of the personal profiling capabilities of the two most important free citation‐based academic search engines, namely, Microsoft Academic Search (MAS) and Google Scholar Citations (GSC). Author profiles can be useful for evaluation purposes once the advantages and the shortcomings of these services are described and taken into consideration. In total, 771 personal profiles appearing in both the MAS and the GSC databases were analyzed. Results show that the GSC profiles include more documents and citations than those in MAS but with a strong bias toward the information and computing sciences, whereas the MAS profiles are disciplinarily better balanced. MAS shows technical problems such as a higher number of duplicated profiles and a lower updating rate than GSC. It is concluded that both services could be used for evaluation proposes only if they are applied along with other citation indices as a way to supplement that information.

Disciplinary differences in the use of academic social networking sites

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to detect and describe disciplinary differences in the users and use of several social networking sites by scientists. Design/methodology/approach – Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) (Spanish National Research Council) researchers registered in the most currently relevant academic social network sites (Google Scholar Citations, Academia.edu, ResearchGate (RG) and Mendeley) were analysed. In total, 6,132 profiles were classified according the eight research areas of the CSIC. Findings – Results show that Academia.edu is massively populated by humanists and social scientists, while RG is popular among biologists. Disciplinary differences are observed across every platform. Thus, scientists from the humanities and social sciences and natural resources show a significant activity contacting other members. On the contrary, biologists are more passive using social tools. Originality/value – This is the first study that analyses the disciplinary perform...