olleges and Universities and Open Access Initiatives

Since 2004, the Ranking Web is published twice a year (January and July), covering more than 20,000 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 policy, promoting substantial increases of the volume and quality of their electronic publications. If you need further clarification regarding the motivations of the Ranking or the methodology, please read the FAQ.

     If your university appears on the Directory, but it is not included in the Ranking, please consider to make a strong effort to increase the number of international academic quality web pages at your website. If you think there is a mistake, you can contact us.

     The section Premier League (Excel Files) is the repository of the current and previous editions� excel files (xls) for the Top 500 that can be used freely citing the source. We do not provide larger, or previous years files and we do not answer commercial or anonymous requests.

Info about the new July edition

Over 20,000 Higher Education Institutions have been analyzed for this edition, including full revisions of US community colleges and new universities from Iran, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Egypt and Jordan. We have increased the number of published institutions to cover the Top 12,000 as ranks beyond that position are not meaningful enough.

Please take into account the following facts about criteria for inclusion and methodology:

• Only universities with an independent domain are considered. If one institution has more than one main domain, we analyze all of them but only the best ranked is published, even if this domain is not the new (current) or the preferred one.
• Since 2009 the ranking is derived from a composite indicator of the normalized values of each variable, not from the ordinals. These individual ranks are provided mainly for reference.
• Strong discrepancies among variables, especially those regarding the Google Scholar figures, concerned us deeply. Some adjustments have been done in several instances.
• One university has been excluded due to bad practices that make impossible a correct calculation of its rank.
• The Bing engine showed an irregular behavior during the period of data harvesting, so it has been excluded temporarily from the present calculations.
• In the last editions a few cases were manipulated to better reflect the overall web performance of the universities. The ranks of the institutions with many and important faculty web domains were obtained merging the data from all of them. As no improvement in the naming practices has been observed, most of these universities are now ranked only with the data obtained for their central web domain.
• Please check the Notes section for explanation of the asterisks.

International Workshop on University Web Rankings 2010 cancelled

     The Third edition of the International Workshop that was going to be held in Granada (Spain) on the October 22^nd has been cancelled.

Insufficient commitment to Open Access

     The table shows one of the reasons why the British universities (provided as example) are lagging behind in Webometrics ranking. See the full story.

Universities	Scopus	Scholar
University College London	134,950	8,660
University of Cambridge	114,339	8,320
University of Oxford	99,723	7,800
Imperial College	91,537	4,720
University of Manchester	83,024	3,840