Webometrics is a study that uses quantitative techniques to track and evaluate the impact of websites and online ideas. It measures the presence, openness, and excellence of university websites. Presence looks at total webpage volume. Openness examines files in research repositories. Excellence considers highly-cited papers. Visibility is also measured through inbound links from third parties to evaluate quality and usefulness. The Webometrics ranking aims to support open access and show institutional commitment to sharing knowledge online.

1. WEBOMETRICS: An indicator of web
presence
FA-ED, VENUS
MANGACO, ORPHA

2. What is Webometrics?
Webometrics is....
(a) a set of quantitative techniques for
tracking and evaluating the impact of web
sites and online ideas and
(b) the information science research field
that developed these ideas.

3. • According to Björneborn and Ingwersen
(2004), the definition of webometrics is
"the study of the quantitative aspects of
the construction and use of information
resources, structures and technologies on
the Web drawing on bibliometric ad
informetric appraches."

4. • A second definition of webometrics has
also been introduced, "the study of web-
based content with primarily quantitative
methods for social science research goals
using techniques that are not specific to
one field of study" (Thelwall, 2009), which
emphasizes the development of applied
methods for use in the wider social
sciences.

5. • The term webometrics was coined
in 1997 by Tomas Almind and
Peter Ingwersen in recognition that
informetric analyses could be
applied to the web

6. WHY WEBOMETRICS?
.The Ranking Web or Webometrics is the largest
academic ranking of Higher Education
Institutions. Since 2004 and every six months an
independent, objective, free, open scientific
exercise is performed by the Cybermetrics Lab
(Spanish National Research Council, CSIC) for
the providing reliable, multidimensional, updated
and useful information about the performance of
universities from all over the world based on
their web presence and impact.

7. • Webometrics Ranking original and still
valid main objective is to support Open
Access (OA) initiatives and to promote
global access to academic knowledege
as produced by universities worldwide.
Ranking intends to be a useful tool
showing the commitment of the
institutions to the OA through carefully
selected web indicators. In this new
edition we introduce two new ones that
intend to reflect better the quality output
(excellence) of the research mission and
the level of knowledge transfer
(openness) of the third mission.

8. • Webometrics only publish a unique Ranking of
Universities in every edition. The combination
of indicators is the result of a careful
investigation and it is not open to individual
choosing by users without enough knowledge
or expertise in this field.
• Webometrics is a ranking of all the universities
of the world, not only a few hundred
institutions from the developed world. Of
course, “World-class” universities usually are
not small or very specialized institutions.

9. • Webometrics uses link analysis for quality
evaluation as it is a far more powerful tool than
citation analysis or global surveys.
• In the first case, bibliometrics only counts formal
recognition between peers, while links not only
includes bibliographic citations but also third parties
involvement with university activities.
• Surveys are not a suitable tool for World Rankings
as there is not even a single individual with a deep
(several semesters per institution), multi-institutional
(several dozen), multidisciplinary (hard sciences,
biomedicine, social sciences, technologies)
experience in a representative sample (different
continents) of universities worldwide.

10. • It 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
policy, promoting substantial increases of
the volume and quality of their electronic
publications.

11. • Webometrics is continuously researching
for improving the ranking, changing or
evolving the indicators and the weighing
model to provide a better classification. It
is a shame that a few rankings maintain
stability between editions without
correcting errors o tuning up indicators.

12. CRITERIA IN
WEBOMETRICS
RANKING

13. CRITERIA IN WEBOMETRICS
RANKING
ACTIVITY (50%)
• PRESENCE (1/3). The global volume of
contents published on the university
webdomains as indexed by the largest
commercial search engine (Google). It counts
every webpage, including all the formats
recognized individually by Google, both static
and dynamic pages. For the purposes of the
Ranking the web presence is a good proxy of
the activities performed by the Universities in
the 21st century.

14. • OPENNESS (1/3). The global effort to
set up institutional research repositories is
explicitly recognized in this indicator that
takes into account the number of rich files
(pdf, doc, docx, ppt) published in
dedicated websites according to the
academic search engine Google Scholar.
Both the total files and the ones with
correctly formed file names are
considered (for example, the Adobe
Acrobat files should end with the suffix
.pdf) for the (new) period 2008-2012.

15. • EXCELLENCE (1/3). The academic
papers published in high impact
international journals are playing a very
important role in the ranking of
Universities. Deepening the commitment
to this measurement started in previous
edition we are introducing the Excellence
indicator, the university scientific output
being part of the 10% of the most cited
papers in their respective scientific fields.
Although this is a measure of high quality
output of research institutions, the data
provider Scimago group supplied non-zero
values for more than 5200 universities
(period 2003-2010).

16. VISIBILITY (50%)
• IMPACT. The quality of the contents is
evaluated through a "virtual referendum",
counting all the external inlinks that the
University webdomain receives from third parties.
Those links are recognizing the institutional
prestige, the academic performance, the value of
the information, and the usefulness of the
services as introduced in the webpages
according to the criteria of millions of web editors
from all over the world. The link visibility data is
collected from the two most important providers
of this information: Majestic SEO and ahrefs, that
provides an overlapping scenario very close to a
true global coverage