INTRODUCTION TO WEBOMETRICS: QUANTITATIVE WEB …



INTRODUCTION TO WEBOMETRICS: QUANTITATIVE WEB RESEARCH FOR THE RANKING OF WORLD UNIVERSITIES; RESEARCH CENTERS AND HOSPITALS

Muammer Kaya

Osmangazi University, Technological Research Center (TEKAM)

ESOGU-TEKAM, Eskişehir, Turkey

E-mail: mkaya@ogu.edu.tr

Ergun Cetin

Osmangazi University, Technological Research Center (TEKAM)

ESOGU-TEKAM, Eskişehir, Turkey

E-mail: erguncetin@ogu.edu.tr

Andac Sözeri

Alcatel

Alcatel, Turkey

─Abstract ─

Webometric rankings of World’s top Universities, Research Centers and Hospitals from academic and scientific point of view are very important and informative. Since 2004, the ranking web is published twice a year covering more than 17000 Higher Education Institutions, 7000 Research Centers and 18000 Hospitals worldwide. Top 6000 Universities, Top 2000 Research Centers and Top 1000 Hospitals are ranked in the world. Web presence measures the activity and visibility of the institutions and it is a good indicator of impact and prestige of Universities, Research Centers and Hospitals. Rank summarizes the global performance of the Universities, Research Centers and Hospitals, provides information for candidate students, patients, researchers, physicians, managers, scholars and citizens in general, and reflects the commitment to the dissemination of scientific knowledge.

This paper gives a brief introduction to the webometric ranking methodology for world Universities, Research Centers and Hospitals. Comparisons for the top 500 Universities, 1000 Hospitals and 300 Research Centers are made. This paper also presents and reviews Turkey’s performance and position in webometric rankings for Universities, Research Centers and Hospitals in the world based on webometric data.

Turkey had 1-3 Universities in the Top 500, 5-8 Universities in the Top 1000 and 41-49 Universities out of 89 ranked Universities in the Top 3000 Universities between 2007 and 2009 in the world. Turkey was in the 36th place in University webometric ranking in the world with 9 Universities in the Top 1000. From Turkey, there were 1 University in the Top 200 and 11 Universities in the Top 500 in the Europe in 2009. Turkey had 2 Research Center in the Top 200 and 3 Research Centers in the Top 2000 in the world in 2009. Turkey had only 1 Hospital in the Top 200 and 13 Hospitals in the Top 2000 in the world. Turkey’s country scoreboard was 44th place in the world in 2009.

Key Words: Webometric, Ranking, University ranking, Cybermetrics, Top Universities/Research Center/ Hospitals, Web Indicators.

JEL Classification: D-83, H75, I-21, I-23 and J-24.

1. INTRODUCTION

More and more scholars are turning to the internet to find scientific information and academic institutions are devoting more and more resources to improving their presence on the web. It is therefore of para-mount importance to take into consideration web publication not only as a primary tool for scholarly communication but as a true reflection of the overall organization and performance of universities/research centers. It is very surprising to discover that for many scholars web presence is not related to their academic duties and they are ignoring requests to contribute to the common effort. Given the huge and diverse audiences that web contents could reach even in developing countries at very modest cost, enhancing also the social role of the scientists. The academic web is a global source of expertise and also a means to communicate scientific and cultural achievements (Aguillo, Granadino, Ortega, and Prieto, 2005). The impact of electronic publications is far larger than that obtained by traditional journals and books on paper. Websites are the most efficient and cheapest way for boosting all three academic missions: teaching, research and technology transfer. Lack of visibility on the web is leading to a worrying level of academic digital divide (Aguillo, Ortega and Fernandez, 2008).

The "Webometric Ranking of World Universities/Research Centers/Hospitals" is an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain. Since 2004, the Ranking Web is published twice a year (January and July), covering more than 17,000 Higher Education Institutions worldwide (). Web presence measures the activity and visibility of the institutions and it is a good indicator of impact and prestige of Universities. Rank summarizes the global performance of the University, provides information for candidate students and scholars, and reflects the commitment to the dissemination of scientific knowledge. Cybermetrics Lab is devoted to the quantitative analysis of the internet and Web contents specially those related to the processes of generation and scholarly communication of scientific knowledge. This is a new emerging discipline that has been called Cybermetrics or Webometrics. Webometric ranking 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.

1.1. Rankings and Web Ranking

Several research teams have been working on the development of web indicators from the mid-1990s, especially after the European Commission (EC) funded two projects, EICSTES (.) and WISER (. and .). After realizing the importance of the search engines as the main intermediaries in the information access processes in the web (Wouters, Reddy, and Aguillo, 2006), new indicators (Scharnhorst and Wouters, 2006; Aguillo, Granadino, Ortega, and Prieto, 2006) were introduced to solve the problems derived from the instability of search engine results (Bar-Ilan, 2005) and the artifacts produced by the Web Impact Factor (Ingwersen, 1998). Using a worldwide catalogue of universities collected during the EICSTES Project and automatic procedures developed for WISER, a preliminary version of a web indicators-based ranking was published in 2004. This application of the cybermetric or webometric techniques does not differ from similar scientometric proposals, where bibliometric data is the core information used for the analysis (Thelwall, 2004). In fact, the application of quantitative methods to the analysis of scientific activities and scholarly communication has been a powerful tool for science policy and research evaluation. Most of the bibliometric indicators, such as the number and distribution of publications and citations, are easy to obtain. But the problem with this approach is that only a restricted number of the activities of the researchers or institutions are considered, since only formal publications are usually taken into account. In fact, scientometric tasks should be a multifaceted enterprise and more variables should be added to the analysis (Moed, 2006).

However, including additional aspects, especially when they are difficult to obtain and the data is very heterogeneous, could make the analysis complex and sometimes unfeasible when global scenarios are intended. Web publication is frequently questioned for the quality of the contents, not taking into account that besides research results published in prestigious journals, the same authors develop a wide range of activities reflected on the web pages. Teaching materials, raw data, drafts, slides, software, bibliographic or link lists are also relevant and inform about the commitment of professors to their students. The structure, composition, and all kinds of administrative information provided by the institution itself are very valuable. When this information is made publicly available through the web, it speaks of the high academic level of the university. The web is providing a comprehensive way to describe this wider range of activities where scientific publications are only one of components to be found on a website (Table 1) (Aguillo, Ortega and Fernandez, 2008).

A few years ago, many websites of even very important institutions were small, with little relevant information and without any added value. This is no longer the case and the top-level universities are publishing millions of pages produced by dozens of departments and services, hundreds of research teams and thousands of scholars. Strong web presence informs of a wide variety of factors that are clearly correlated with the global quality of the institution: widespread availability of computer resources, global internet literacy, policies promoting democracy and freedom of speech, competition for international visibility or support of open access initiatives, etc. Although an unknown fraction of the contents of a university domain are not academic, the patterns obtained are meaningful enough given the large numbers involved in the webometric analysis. In addition, granting access to and promoting web publication among faculty member’s means that other colleagues will be aware of the scientific results produced, more candidate students can learn about the university, companies can find suitable partners for industrial projects, and organizations can easily access contact data for experts. These and other reasons should be taken into consideration when supporting Open Access initiatives ( access.) intended to obtain institutional mandates for information web archiving.

Table1. Some Personal Activities Reflected in Personal WebPages

|Research |( Technology Transfer ( |Teaching |

|Raw experimental data | |Multimedia |

| |Personal CV | |

| |Research Team description | |

| |Press notes and interviews | |

| |TV programmes | |

|New software | |Workshop slides |

|Conference slides/presentations | |Bibliographys |

|Projects, Grants, Scholarships | |Bureaucratic reports |

|Project development/final reports | | |

|Book chapters |Thesis, dissertations | |

| | |Seminar slides/presentations |

|Books, papers, monographs |Organized events calls | |

| | |Textbooks |

|Patents | |Book reviews |

|Drafts, preprints | |Web sites for e-learning |

|Peer reviews | |Answers for exams |

| |Papers in prestigious journals | |

| | | |

|Papers in local/university journals | | |

1.2. Collecting Data

Counting a large number of web domains with huge numbers of pages can only be done automatically. One possibility is to use one of the available commercial or free crawlers, but tuning up these robots can be very difficult and they require important human and computer resources (Cothey, 2004). On the other hand, search engines already have well designed and tested robots; they frequently update their databases and they have automatic tools that can be customized with powerful operators for data extraction. Moreover, as search engines are the main intermediaries in web navigation, the presence of a domain in their databases is an indicator of visibility. Commercial search engines also have limitations, including inconsistent and rounded results, biases in geographical and linguistic coverage or frequent and opaque changes in their working procedures. To avoid some of these problems, several search engines are used together. The number of independent search engines with large databases is small and not all of them are usable for cybermetric purposes. They are Google (and Google Scholar), Yahoo Search, Live (but not Academic Live), Exalead and Alexa (Aguillo et al., 2006). Extracting values from search engines can be done with the help of operators, such as site, link or file-type. However not all the engines support the same options nor is the syntax ever the same. Unfortunately, both Google and Live are now not usable for hypertext analysis. On the other hand, Google PageRank and Alexa Traffic Rank can be recovered as relative positions values. An interesting option provided only by Yahoo search is the possibility to identify sub-domains for a certain domain although the results are usually very noisy.

1.3 Constructing the Ranking

The web has an important advantage over other systems as it is easier to identify the institutional units even if their names or locations are very similar. Usually each organization has a different web domain that can be used for recovering data from search engines. Unfortunately this is not universally the case, as a few universities have more than one main domain, use aliases or provide independent domains for some of their sub-units or services. In some cases there is no central domain or the central or unique domain refers only to a faculty or department. Most domains do not change over long periods, but sometimes institutions merge or split or merely adopt a new domain. These changes have a deep impact on the rankings as the number of external inlinks decreases abruptly. There are three key aspects to be measured in the academic web: Size, that is, volume of information published. Visibility, the number of ‘situations’ (site citations & external inlinks) the domain receives; and popularity as the number of visits or visitors of the web pages (Aguillo, Ortega and Fernandez, 2008).

Bibliometrics have traditionally ignored journal circulation and focused on impact, the ratio between number of citations and number of papers. A similar approach is proposed not only to make comparisons possible but also due to the methodological problems for obtaining trustworthy data of visits and visitors. A series of criteria are monitored, but only size (S) and visibility (V) are included in the final ranking. The model states that the ratio between both is 1:1, but in order to reflect the diversity of the academic contents, the size component is split into three to measure raw volume of pages, number of rich files (R), and number of papers collected by Google Scholar (Sc). The last two indicators are relevant as we intend to measure commitment to open access publication. According to the proposed model the ranking (WR) is obtained with the following formula:

WR = 2*Rank (S)+Rank (R)+Rank (Sc)+4*Rank (V)

The ratio combining the weights assigned to each element is (2+1+1):4 or 1:1 as intended. Other variants are also acceptable, but empirical tests show they provide results less comparable to other sources. In order to avoid size-related problems, search engines bias, and other factors, the absolute numbers collected were log-normalized, transformed in ordinals and then combined with the aforementioned formula for (WR) (Zitt and Filliatreau, 2007).

2. NUMBER OF NATIONAL DOMAINS

Germany had 80.1, United Kingdom (UK) 31.9 and Japan 23.4 millions national domains in 2009. Table 2 shows the Top 10 countries which have the highest number of domains in the world. Turkey had 1.16 million national domains and in the 36th place out of 240 countries in the world.

Table 2: Number of National Domains Ranking in the World

|RANK |COUNTRY |NUMBER OF NATIONAL DOMAINS |

|1 |Germany  (de) |[pic] |80,100,000 |

|2 |United Kingdom (uk) |[pic] |31,900,000 |

|3 |Japan (jp) |[pic] |23,400,000 |

|4 |Netherlands (nl) |[pic] |17,400,000 |

|5 |China  (cn) |[pic] |15,000,000 |

|6 |Russian Federation (ru) |[pic] |14,900,000 |

|7 |Poland (pl) |[pic] |12,300,000 |

|8 |Italy  (it) |[pic] |12,200,000 |

|9 |France  (fr) |[pic] |8,170,000 |

|10 |Brazil (br) |[pic] |7,920,000 |

|36 |Turkey (tr) |[pic] |1,160,000 |

|236 |

|Marshall Islands  (mh) |

|[pic] |

|3 |

| |

|237 |

|Wallis And Futuna Islands (wf) |

|[pic] |

|1 |

| |

|238 |

|Mayotte (yt) |

|[pic] |

|1 |

| |

|239 |

|Montenegro (me) |

|[pic] |

| |

| |

|240 |

|Svalbard and Jan Mayen Islands (sj) |

|[pic] |

| |

| |

3. WEBOMETRIC RANKING OF WORLD'S UNIVERSITIES

3.1. Objectives of the Webometric Ranking of World's Universities

Table 3 shows distribution of countries and ranked University numbers for webometric ranking in the world. In July 2009, totally 13074 Universities in 240 countries were ranked. 5022 Universities were in America, 3988 Universities in Europe and 3456 Universities were in Asia continent. Previously the top 3000 and 4000 Universities were ranked. The new edition, scheduled for late July 2009, ranks more universities in order to make consistent the world and regional rankings. That means that now the Top 6000 institutions are presented.

Table 3: Ranked University Distribution among Continents in the World by Webometric Ranking

| |Countries |Universities |[|

| | | |p|

| | | |i|

| | | |c|

| | | |]|

|[pic] |

|  AFRICA |58 |512 |

|[pic] |

|  AMERICA |52 |5.022 |

|[pic] |

|  ASIA |47 |3.456 |

|[pic] |

|  EUROPE |57 |3.988 |

|[pic] |

|  OCEANIA |26 |96 |

The original aim of the ranking is to promote web publication. Supporting Open Access initiatives, electronic access to scientific publications and to other academic material are primary targets. However web indicators are very useful for ranking purposes too as they are not based on number of visits or page design but on the global performance and visibility of the universities. As other rankings focused only on a few relevant aspects, specially research results, web indicators based ranking reflects better the whole picture, as many other activities of professors and researchers are showed by their web presence. The Web covers not only formal (e-journals, repositories) but also informal scholarly communication. Web publication is cheaper, maintaining the high standards of quality of peer review processes. It could also reach much larger potential audiences, offering access to scientific knowledge to researchers and institutions located in developing countries and also to third parties (economic, industrial, political or cultural stakeholders) in their own community. The Webometrics ranking has a larger coverage than other similar rankings (Table 4). The ranking is not only focused on research results but also in other indicators which may reflect better the global quality of the scholar and research institutions worldwide.

Webometric ranking 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. Candidate students should use additional criteria if they are trying to choose university. Webometric Ranking correlates well with quality of education provided and academic prestige, but other non-academic variables need to be taken into account.

Table 4: Comparison of the Main World Universities' Rankings

[pic]

Source:

3.2. Coverage of the Webometric Ranking of World Universities

Table 5 summarizes the actual coverage of the ranking, in terms of number of countries and higher education institutions around the world. North America, Europe and Asia are the first three continents that have top Universities in the world, respectively.

Table 5: The Number of Universities in the Top 100, 200, 500 and 1000 according to Continents and Countries in July 2009.

[pic]

Source:

3.3. Design and Weighting of Indicators

The unit for analysis is the institutional domain, so only universities, hospitals and research centers with an independent web domain are considered. If an institution has more than one main domain, two or more entries are used with the different addresses. The first Web indicator, Web Impact Factor (WIF), was based on link analysis that combines the number of external inlinks and the number of pages of the website, a ratio of 1:1 between visibility and size. This ratio is used for the ranking, adding two new indicators to the size component: Number of documents, measured from the number of rich files in a web domain, and number of publications being collected by Google Scholar database. Four indicators were obtained from the quantitative results provided by the main search engines as follows:

Size (S). Number of pages recovered from four engines: Google, Yahoo, Live Search and Exalead. For each engine, results are log-normalized to 1 for the highest value. Then for each domain, maximum and minimum results are excluded and every institution is assigned a rank according to the combined sum. The inclusion of the total number of pages is based on the recognition of a new global market for academic information, so the web is the adequate platform for the internationalization of the institutions. A strong and detailed web presence providing exact descriptions of the structure and activities of the university can attract new students and scholars worldwide.

Visibility (V). The total number of unique external links received (inlinks) by a site can be only confidently obtained from Yahoo Search. Results are log-normalized to 1 for the highest value and then combined to generate the rank. The number of external inlinks received by a domain is a measure that represents visibility and impact of the published material, and although there is a great diversity of motivations for linking, a significant fraction works in a similar way as bibliographic citation.

Rich Files (R). After evaluation of their relevance to academic and publication activities and considering the volume of the different file formats, the following were selected: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf), Adobe PostScript (.ps), Microsoft Word (.doc) and Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt). These data were extracted using Google, Yahoo Search, Live Search and Exalead. These data were extracted using Google and merging the results for each file type after log-normalizing in the same way as described before.

The success of self-archiving and other repositories related initiatives can be roughly represented from rich file and Scholar data. The huge numbers involved with the pdf and doc formats means that not only administrative reports and bureaucratic forms are involved. PostScript and Powerpoint files are clearly related to academic activities.

Scholar (Sc). Google Scholar provides the number of papers and citations for each academic domain. These results from the Scholar database represent papers, reports and other academic items.

The four ranks were combined according to a formula where each one has a different weight but maintaining the ratio 1:1 (Table 6).

Table 6: Effects of Webometric Rank Weighting Factors

[pic]

Source:

3.4. Top 50 Universities in the World

Table 7 shows the top 10 Universities in the World in July 2009. MIT, Harvard and Stanford are the first three Universities in USA and in the world. USA has 40 Universities in the Top 50. The Top 21 Universities are from the USA. England (Cambridge (22nd) and Oxford (42nd)), Japan (Tokyo (24th) and Kyoto (49th)) and Canada (Toronto (28th) and UBC (41st)) have 2 universities, Taiwan (National Taiwan University (26th)), Brazil (San Paulo (38th)), Mexico (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (44th)) and Switzerland (Swiss Federal Institude of Technology, ETH Zurich (46th)) have 1 Universities in the top 50 Universities in the world.

Table 7: Top 10 Universities in the world.

|WORLD RANK |UNIVERSITY |COUNTRY | SIZE | VISIBILITY |RICH FILES |SCHOLAR |

|  |  |  |  |  |  |

|1 |[pic]Massachusetts Institute of Technology |[pic] |2 |1 |1 |7 |

|[pic] |

|2 |[pic]Harvard University ** |[pic] |7 |2 |12 |1 |

|[pic] |

|3 |[pic]Stanford University |[pic] |4 |4 |2 |24 |

|[pic] |

|4 |[pic]University of California Berkeley |[pic] |8 |3 |5 |32 |

|[pic] |

|5 |[pic]Cornell University |[pic] |1 |5 |9 |37 |

|[pic] |

|6 |[pic]University of Wisconsin Madison |[pic] |3 |10 |6 |71 |

|[pic] |

|7 |[pic]University of Minnesota |[pic] |6 |15 |7 |22 |

|[pic] |

|8 |[pic]California Institute of Technology ** |[pic] |18 |6 |20 |30 |

|[pic] |

|9 |[pic]University of Illinois Urbana Champaign * |[pic] |17 |7 |13 |51 |

|[pic] |

|10 |[pic]University of Michigan |[pic] |10 |8 |18 |55 |

3.5. Top University Distribution by Countries in 2009

Table 8 shows countries which have more Universities in the Top 200, 500 and 1000. In this webometric ranking, the USA has 94 in the Top 200, 155 in the Top 500 and 296 Universities in the Top 1000. Germany has 14 in the Top 200, 49 in the Top 500 and 63 Universities in Top 1000. Canada, UK and Japan are also in the first fifth rank. Turkey is in the 36th place with 1 university in the Top 500 and 8 Universities in the Top 1000.

Table 8: Distribution by Countries in the Top 200, 500 and 1000.

|Distribution by Country |

|[pic] |

| |

|[pic] |

| |

| |

|  |

|  |

|  |

|  |

| |

|RANK |

|COUNTRY |

|Top 200 |

|Top 500 |

|Top 1000 |

| |

|  |

|  |

|  |

|  |

|  |

| |

|1 |

|United States of America |

|[pic] |

|94 |

|155 |

|296 |

| |

|2 |

|Germany |

|[pic] |

|14 |

|49 |

|63 |

| |

|3 |

|Canada |

|[pic] |

|12 |

|25 |

|38 |

| |

|4 |

|United Kingdom |

|[pic] |

|10 |

|36 |

|70 |

| |

|5 |

|Japan |

|[pic] |

|7 |

|13 |

|50 |

| |

|6 |

|Spain |

|[pic] |

|6 |

|27 |

|43 |

| |

|7 |

|Australia |

|[pic] |

|6 |

|13 |

|28 |

| |

|8 |

|Sweden |

|[pic] |

|6 |

|10 |

|14 |

| |

|9 |

|Taiwan |

|[pic] |

|5 |

|14 |

|35 |

| |

|10 |

|Brazil |

|[pic] |

|5 |

|12 |

|32 |

| |

|11 |

|Italy |

|[pic] |

|4 |

|17 |

|38 |

| |

|12 |

|Netherlands |

|[pic] |

|4 |

|12 |

|13 |

| |

|13 |

|Switzerland |

|[pic] |

|3 |

|6 |

|10 |

| |

|14 |

|Norway |

|[pic] |

|3 |

|4 |

|4 |

| |

|15 |

|Czech Republic |

|[pic] |

|2 |

|7 |

|10 |

| |

|36 |

|Turkey |

|[pic] |

| |

|1 |

|8 |

| |

| |

| |

|[pic] |

| |

| |

| |

3.6. European University Ranking

Table 9 shows webometricly ranked Universities in European countries. Russian Federation has 694, France 597 and Germany 408 ranked Universities. Table 10 shows both top 10 Universities ranked in Europe and Turkish University positions in the Top 500 in Europe. METU is in the 191st, Bogazici University 236th and Bilkent University 276th place in European University ranking. There were 1 University in the Top 200 and 11 Universities in the Top 500 Universities in Europe from Turkey in 2009.

Table:9: The numbers of Universities ranked in European Countries

|Country |University ranked |Country |University ranked |

|Austria |67 |Italy |201 |

|Belgium |160 |Netherlands |134 |

|G. Britain |236 |Norway |70 |

|Bulgaria |55 |Poland |436 |

|Czech Republic |57 |Portugal |114 |

|Denmark |137 |Romania |86 |

|Greece |66 |Russian Fed. |694 |

|Finland |53 |Spain |218 |

|France |597 |Sweden |55 |

|Germany |408 |Switzerland |104 |

|Israel |32 |TURKEY |89 |

Table 10: University Ranking in Europe in July 2009.

|RANKING | | |POSITION |

| |[pic] |

|EUROPE |WORLD |UNIVERSITY |COUNTRY | SIZE  |VISIB.  |RICH FILES |SCHOLAR |

|  |  |  |  |  |  |

|1 |22 |University of Cambridge |[pic] |26 |13 |70 |86 |

|2 |42 |University of Oxford |[pic] |122 |19 |51 |157 |

|3 |46 |Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zurich |[pic] |84 |49 |76 |43 |

|4 |51 |University College London |[pic] |100 |39 |59 |126 |

|5 |52 |University of Helsinki ** |[pic] |67 |89 |43 |56 |

|6 |54 |Norwegian University of Science & Technology |[pic] |88 |58 |86 |45 |

|7 |55 |University of Oslo |[pic] |62 |67 |39 |122 |

|8 |68 |Universität Wien |[pic] |130 |87 |57 |67 |

|9 |69 |Universidad Complutense de Madrid |[pic] |108 |110 |185 |5 |

|10 |71 |University of Edinburgh |[pic] |196 |59 |63 |124 |

|191 |435 |Middle East Technical University * |[pic] |330 |817 |300 |354 |

|236 |510 |Bogazici University |[pic] |1,597 |281 |543 |931 |

|276 |630 |Bilkent University |[pic] |559 |1,182 |409 |644 |

|327 |765 |Ankara University |[pic] |698 |1,442 |930 |379 |

|355 |828 |Istanbul Technical University |[pic] |753 |1,608 |534 |724 |

|366 |850 |Sabanci University * |[pic] |830 |1,850 |894 |295 |

|383 |903 |Hacettepe University |[pic] |940 |1,611 |657 |792 |

|384 |904 |University of Anatolia |[pic] |1,609 |905 |1,004 |945 |

|418 |1002 |Agean University |[pic] |1,127 |1,663 |711 |970 |

|430 |1050 |Gazi University |[pic] |617 |2,560 |1,114 |555 |

|474 |1152 |Inonu University Malatya |[pic] |1,768 |1,620 |1,970 |540 |

3.7. Rank of Universities in Turkey

In Turkey, totally 89 Universities were webometricaly ranked. Table 11 shows ranks of Unversities in Turkey in July 2009. METU is in the 425th, Bogazici University 510th, Bilkent 630th place in the world. Ankara, İstanbul Technical, Sabancı, Hacettepe and Anadolu Universities are in the Top 10 places. There are only one University in the Top 500, eight Universities in the Top 1000, twenty three Universities in the Top 2000 and forty nine in the Top 3000 Universities in the world. Between 2007 and 2009, in the webometric ranking of world Universities, Turkey had 1-3 Universities in the Top 500, 5-8 in the Top 1000 and 41-49 in the Top 3000 in the world (Kaya and Cetin, 2009)

3.8. Country Scoreboard

The Country Scoreboard has been designed following the model of the QS SAFE National System for evaluation of the countries' higher education system according to the presence of their Universities in the Top 500 of the Ranking Web. Four normalized indicators are used with equal weighting as follows:

• System: Number of universities in the Top 500 in the given country, divided by the mean position of those institutions.

• Access: A score built according to ranks (5 points for a university in the top 100, 4 points for 101-200, 3 points for 201-300, 2 for 301-400 and 1 for 401-500) divided by the population size (root of the population in thousands) of the country (World Bank, 2007).

• Flagship: A normalized score (100 for positions 1-20, 96 for 21-40, and so on) based on the leading university rank for countries with institutions among the Top 500.

• Economic: Same score as the access defined before but divided by the GDP (PPP) per capita for the country in question (World Bank, 2007).

Table 11: Rank of Universities in Turkey in 2009.

|Rank of Universities in Turkey |[|

| |p|

| |i|

| |c|

| |]|

|[pic] |

|  |

|  |

|  |

|POSITION |

| |

| |

| |

|[pic] |

| |

|WORLD RANK |

|UNIVERSITY |

|  |

| SIZE |

| VISIBILITY |

| RICH FILES |

| SCHOLAR |

| |

|  |

|  |

|  |

|  |

|  |

|  |

| |

|435 |

|Middle East Technical University * |

|  |

|330 |

|817 |

|300 |

|354 |

| |

|510 |

|Bogazici University |

|  |

|1,597 |

|281 |

|543 |

|931 |

| |

|630 |

|Bilkent University |

|  |

|559 |

|1,182 |

|409 |

|644 |

| |

|765 |

|Ankara University |

|  |

|698 |

|1,442 |

|930 |

|379 |

| |

|828 |

|Istanbul Technical University |

|  |

|753 |

|1,608 |

|534 |

|724 |

| |

|850 |

|Sabanci University * |

| |

|830 |

|1,850 |

|894 |

|295 |

| |

|903 |

|Hacettepe University |

| |

|940 |

|1,611 |

|657 |

|792 |

| |

|904 |

|University of Anatolia |

| |

|1,609 |

|905 |

|1,004 |

|945 |

| |

|1002 |

|Agean University |

| |

|1,127 |

|1,663 |

|711 |

|970 |

| |

|1050 |

|Gazi University |

| |

|617 |

|2,560 |

|1,114 |

|555 |

| |

|1152 |

|Inonu University Malatya |

| |

|1,768 |

|1,620 |

|1,970 |

|540 |

| |

|1256 |

|Istanbul University |

|  |

|1,540 |

|1,903 |

|1,059 |

|1,182 |

| |

|1306 |

|Dokuz Eylul University |

|  |

|508 |

|2,896 |

|873 |

|1,496 |

| |

|1364 |

|Erciyes University |

|  |

|1,065 |

|1,962 |

|1,416 |

|1,513 |

| |

|1475 |

|Cukurova University |

|  |

|1,657 |

|3,021 |

|1,440 |

|764 |

| |

|1569 |

|Selcuk University |

|  |

|3,265 |

|2,903 |

|958 |

|980 |

| |

|1570 |

|Istanbul Bilgi University |

|  |

|442 |

|2,566 |

|1,228 |

|2,832 |

| |

|1680 |

|Uludag University |

|  |

|1,834 |

|3,184 |

|1,611 |

|1,086 |

| |

|1791 |

|Karadeniz Technical University |

|  |

|1,978 |

|2,145 |

|2,115 |

|1,917 |

| |

|1869 |

|Yildiz Technical University |

|  |

|2,484 |

|3,495 |

|1,412 |

|1,272 |

| |

|1935 |

|Koc University |

|  |

|2,524 |

|4,043 |

|1,106 |

|1,383 |

| |

|1976 |

|University of Gaziantep |

|  |

|1,608 |

|3,892 |

|1,596 |

|1,551 |

| |

|1995 |

|Suleyman Demirel University Turkey |

|  |

|2,072 |

|3,983 |

|1,797 |

|1,218 |

| |

|2074 |

|Trakya University |

|  |

|1,735 |

|4,220 |

|2,124 |

|1,302 |

| |

|2130 |

|Fatih University |

|  |

|1,440 |

|4,239 |

|1,621 |

|1,885 |

| |

|2155 |

|Canakkale Onsekyz Mart University |

|  |

|3,001 |

|2,650 |

|2,363 |

|1,952 |

| |

|2190 |

|Sakarya University |

|  |

|1,858 |

|4,038 |

|1,818 |

|1,808 |

| |

|2203 |

|Tobb University of Economics and Technology |

|  |

|2,944 |

|2,683 |

|2,438 |

|2,082 |

| |

|2208 |

|Ataturk University |

|  |

|2,136 |

|3,284 |

|5,162 |

|984 |

| |

|2233 |

|Marmara University |

|  |

|2,445 |

|2,857 |

|2,092 |

|2,516 |

| |

|2243 |

|Afyon Kocatepe University |

|  |

|4,401 |

|2,504 |

|1,737 |

|2,333 |

| |

|2281 |

|Istanbul Kultur University |

|  |

|3,888 |

|3,188 |

|2,632 |

|1,460 |

| |

|2305 |

|University of Mersin |

|  |

|2,147 |

|4,718 |

|2,547 |

|1,261 |

| |

|2313 |

|Akdeniz University |

|  |

|1,982 |

|3,530 |

|2,038 |

|2,462 |

| |

|2347 |

|Cumhuriyet University |

|  |

|3,669 |

|4,815 |

|2,470 |

|922 |

| |

|2349 |

|Kahramanmaras Sutcu Imam University |

|  |

|2,717 |

|2,808 |

|4,202 |

|1,734 |

| |

|2367 |

|Baskent University |

|  |

|2,329 |

|3,656 |

|1,288 |

|3,147 |

| |

|2430 |

|Izmir Institute of Technology * |

|  |

|3,122 |

|4,920 |

|2,159 |

|1,290 |

| |

|2442 |

|Ondokuz Mayis University |

|  |

|3,266 |

|4,807 |

|2,650 |

|1,127 |

| |

|2443 |

|Eskisehir Osmangazi University |

|  |

|2,256 |

|3,552 |

|2,202 |

|2,649 |

| |

|2474 |

|Atilim University |

|  |

|3,483 |

|3,999 |

|1,798 |

|2,009 |

| |

|2533 |

|Firat University |

|  |

|3,819 |

|5,103 |

|2,522 |

|1,088 |

| |

|2585 |

|University of Yuzuncu |

|  |

|3,076 |

|4,404 |

|3,263 |

|1,452 |

| |

|2601 |

|Kocaeli University |

|  |

|3,128 |

|4,003 |

|2,154 |

|2,332 |

| |

|2638 |

|Pamukkale University |

|  |

|4,858 |

|2,418 |

|2,723 |

|2,937 |

| |

|2763 |

|Cankaya University |

|  |

|3,289 |

|4,197 |

|2,489 |

|2,385 |

| |

|2828 |

|Yeditepe University |

|  |

|5,007 |

|4,813 |

|1,463 |

|2,165 |

| |

|2841 |

|Balikesir University |

|  |

|3,401 |

|4,477 |

|2,245 |

|2,495 |

| |

|2862 |

|Adnan Menderes University |

|  |

|3,299 |

|4,219 |

|2,616 |

|2,547 |

| |

|3035 |

|Dicle University |

|  |

|5,576 |

|4,643 |

|2,720 |

|1,740 |

| |

Table 12 shows country scoreboard for the top 45 countries in the world. USA, UK, Germany, Canada and Taiwan are the first five countries. In this category Turkey is in the 44th place in the world with overall 26 score points out of 100.

Table 12: Country Scoreboard in 2009.

|Country Scoreboard |[|

| |p|

| |i|

| |c|

| |]|

|[pic] |

|Rank |Country |System |Access |

|USA & Canada |48 |72 |153 |

|Europe |37 |94 |249 |

|Asia |11 |23 |62 |

|International | |1 |2 |

|Oceania |2 |2 |9 |

|Latin America |2 |8 |22 |

|Africa | | |1 |

|Arab World | | |2 |

The major change introduced in the last edition relates to the way the composite index (World Ranking) is computed. To improve the measurement of the academic impact, the visibility indicator has been build giving extra importance to the external inlinks that do not come from generic domains (.com, .org, .net). Webometric ranking intend to motivate both institutions and scientists 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, scientific authorities should reconsider their web policy, promoting substantial increases of the volume and quality of their electronic publications.

4.1. Top 2000 Research Centers

Table 14 shows the Top 10 research centers in the world in 2009. Seven of them are in the USA. Three of them are in Europe (France, EU and Germany). Table 15 shows the position ranks of Turkish research centers in the Top 2000 in the world. There are only three research centers in the Top 2000 in the World. Tubitak is in the 102nd, Atatürk Training and Research Center 189th and Marmara Research Center (MAM) 1887th place in the World. In Europe, Tubitak is in the 38th and Atatürk Training and Research Center 88th place.

Table 14: Top 10 Research Centers in the World in July 2009.

| |[pic] | |

|WORLD RANK |INSTITUTE |COUNTRY |SIZE |VISIBILITY |RICH FILES |SCHOLAR | |

|  | |

|1 |National Institutes of Health |[pic] |1 |2 |13 |1 | |

|2 |National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA |[pic] |2 |4 |1 |20 | |

|3 |World Wide Web Consortium |[pic] |11 |1 |30 |230 | |

|4 |National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration |[pic] |3 |3 |2 |44 | |

|5 |Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique CNRS |[pic] |8 |9 |21 |11 | |

|6 |US Geological Survey |[pic] |9 |10 |6 |30 | |

|7 |NASA Goddard Space Flight Center |[pic] |6 |12 |3 |80 | |

|8 |European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN |[pic] |22 |19 |8 |15 | |

|9 |Centers for Disease Control and Prevention |[pic] |83 |7 |14 |25 | |

|10 |Max Planck Gesellschaft |[pic] |7 |15 |16 |27 | |

Table 15: Turkish Research Centers in the Top 2000 in the World in July 2009.

| | |[pic] |

|WORLD RANK |RESEARCH CENTER | |SIZE |VISIBILITY |RICH FILES |SCHOLAR |

| |  | |  |  |  |

|102 |Tubitak Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey | |188 |276 |254 |28 |

|189 |Ataturk Training and Research Hospital | |326 |249 |173 |572 |

|1887 |Marmara Research Center (MAM) | |2,123 |2,136 |941 |2,927 |

5. WEBOMETRIC RANKING OF HOSPITALS

The Cybermetrics Lab is publishing this Webometrics Ranking of World Hospitals from a purely academic point of view and as such it should be used. The Web indicators applied does not measure at all the quality of patient's treatment and health care offered by the hospitals included. So please be aware that if you are looking for the best place to treat a health condition this ranking is not appropriated for such a search. The Ranking Web of World Hospitals is introduced as a tool for showing the commitment of health organizations to the electronic publication and dissemination of academic information related to medicine. The Top Hospitals should be prone to share their information not only with other colleagues (physicians, researchers, scholars) but also with the rest of society, patients, community leaders, managers and citizens in general.

The Web indicators measure electronic contents, especially those used for scholarly communication, but also basic information about the hospital, its organization, services and personnel. The rank takes into account both the volume of information published and the impact or visibility of such contents measured by the number of external links the web pages receive from others. Surprisingly, many hospitals, even in the developed countries, have a poor presence in the Web or no presence at all. This lack of valuable contents publicly available is really very concerning and it is no longer acceptable in the 21st century. This new edition introduces some changes with respect to the January edition. The Directory has been updated and increased (there is now almost 18000 hospitals worldwide). To calculate the composite index (World Ranking).

Table 16 shows the Top 10 hospitals in the world. Eight of them are in the USA and two of them are in China in 2009. Table 17 shows Turkish hospitals in the Top 2000 in the world and in the Europe. Haydarpasa Gata Arastırma Hospital is in the 182th, Istanbul Universities Cerrahpasa Tıp Fak. Hastahanesi 224th and Acıbadem Hospital Group 272th place in the world. There are fourteen Turkish hospital in the Top 2000 hospitals in the world. There are also nine Turkish hospitals in the Top 500 hospitals in Europe.

Table 16: The Top 10 Hospitals in the World in 2009.

|  |  | |POSITION |

| | |[pic] |

|WORLD RANK |HOSPITAL |COUNTRY |SIZE |VISIBILITY |RICH FILES |SCHOLAR |

| |  | | | | |

|1 |University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston |[pic] |12 |35 |2 |4 |

|2 |University of Michigan Health System |[pic] |5 |18 |5 |25 |

|3 |University of Kansas Medical Center |[pic] |8 |39 |3 |5 |

|4 |NYU Langone Medical Center New York, NY |[pic] |1 |23 |7 |36 |

|5 |University of Virginia Health System |[pic] |17 |57 |4 |14 |

|6 |Vanderbilt Medical Center |[pic] |10 |27 |11 |33 |

|7 |Chang Gung Memorial Hospital * |[pic] |33 |31 |27 |8 |

|8 |Johns Hopkins Medicine |[pic] |41 |20 |24 |41 |

|9 |Taipei Veterans General Hospital * |[pic] |68 |68 |32 |3 |

|10 |University of Rochester Medical Center |[pic] |13 |58 |10 |50 |

Table 17: Turkish Hospital in the Top 2000 in the World and in the Top 500 in Europe.

|RANK | |[pic] |

|WORLD EU |HOSPITAL | |SIZE |VISIBILITY |RICH FILES |SCHOLAR |

|  |  | |  |  |  |

|182 66 |Haydarpasa Gata Arastirma Hastanesi | |656 |848 |51 |119 |

|224 83 |Istanbul Universitesi Cerrahpasa Tip Fak. Hastanesi * | |1,123 |890 |189 |57 |

|272 99 |Acibadem Hospital Group | |536 |92 |5,039 |779 |

|357 126 |Ege University Medical School & Hospital | |1,084 |1,008 |233 |153 |

|477 166 |Turkiye Hastanesi | |8,042 |19 |11,207 |2,200 |

|766 282 |Anadolu Saglik Merkezi | |1,350 |619 |1,141 |2,200 |

|886 329 |Isviçre Hastanesi | |11,217 |65 |11,207 |2,200 |

|1030 395 |Acibadem International | |4,287 |379 |7,534 |1,497 |

|1201 466 |Ankara Saglik Müdürlügü | |1,908 |1,710 |435 |2,200 |

|1285 |Hacettepe Universitesi Hastaneleri | |838 |968 |9,891 |2,200 |

|1438 |Memorial Hospital | |684 |1,640 |4,559 |2,200 |

|1532 |Kayseri Egitim Ve Arastirma Hastanesi | |3,357 |1,148 |1,955 |2,200 |

|1852 |Dunya Göz Hastanesi Grup World Eye Centers | |2,083 |1,436 |9,166 |1,497 |

6. CONCLUSIONS

Today the worldwide web (www) 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 an university’s rankings. This paper presented/reviewed the Webometric Ranking of World Universities which was built using a combined indicator called WR that takes into account the number of published web pages (S) (25%), the number of rich files, those in pdf, ps, doc and ppt format (R) (12.5 %), the number of articles gathered from the Google Scholar Database (Sc) (12.5%) and the total number of external inlinks (V) (50 %). The results showed that there was a larger than expected academic digital divide between higher education, research and hospital institutions in the United States and the European Union and those in Turkey. US universities, research centers and hospitals are far bigger and better than European and Turkish counterparts. This kind of rankings using web indicators should be used to measure universities’ performance in conjunction with more traditional academic indicators.

If the web performance of an institution is below the expected position according to their academic excellence, university, research center and hospital authorities should reconsider their web policy, promoting substantial increases of the volume and quality of their electronic publications.

Turkey has 1-3 Universities in the Top 500, 5-8 Universities in the Top 1000 and 41-49 Universities out of 89 ranked Universities in the Top 3000 Universities in the world between 2007 and 2009. Turkey was in the 36th place in University webometric ranking in the world with 9 Universities in the Top 1000. Turkey has 1 University in the Top 200 and 11 Universities in the Top 500 in the Europe. Turkey has 2 Research Center in the Top 200 and 3 Research Centers in the Top 2000 in the world. Turkey has only 1 Hospital in the Top 200 and 13 Hospitals in the Top 2000 in the world. Turkey’s country scoreboard is 44th place in the world. Turkey’s position in webometric University, Research Center and Hospital rankings are not in the desired level. Turkey’s Universities, Research Centers and Hospital should spent more afford, money and time to reach much better positions in the world webometric rankings in order to be recognized in the world. Turkish institutions worldwide adopt a strong web policy.

Turkey’s webometrically best Universities are METU, Bogazici ve Bilkent Universities; webometrically best Research Centers are TUBITAK, Atatürk Training and Research Hospital and TUBITAK-MAM and Turkey’s webometrically best Hospitals are Haydarpaşa GATA, İstanbul Üniversitesi Cerrahpasa Tıp Fak. And Acıbadem Hospital Group.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aguillo, I.F., Granadino, B., Ortega, J.L. and Prieto, J.A. (2005), “What the Internet Says about Sconce”, The Scientists, 19, (14).

Aquillo, I.F., Granadino, B., Ortega, J.L. and Prieto, J.A., (2006), “Scientific Research Activity and Communications Measured with Cybermetric Indicators”, Journal of American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57, (10), pp: 1296-1302.

Aquillo, I.F., Ortega, J.L and Fernandez M., (2008), “Webometric Ranking of World Universities: Introduction, Methodology and Future Developments”, Higher Education in Europe, Vol. 343, No: 2/3, July-October.

Bar-Ilan, J. (2005), “Search Engine Features Needed for Web Research at Mid-2005”, Cybermetrics, 9 (1).

Cothey, V., (2004), “Web Crawling Reliability”, Journal of the American Society for Information Sciences and Technology, 55, (14), pp: 1228-1238

access (Accessed 20.12.2009(.

(Accessed 20.12.2009(.

Ingwersen, P., (1998), “The Calculation of Web Impact Factors”, Journal of Documentation, 54 (2), pp: 236-243.

Kaya, M. and Cetin E., (2009), “ Harnessing ICT to Improve E-Government and E-Governance”, First International Conference on Advances in E-Government and E-Governance (ICEGOV-2009), Ed. by. Kaplan A., Balcı A., Aktan, C.C. and Dalbay, O., Ankara-Turkey, Vol. 1, pp: 79-95.

Moed, H.F., (2006), Bibliomertic Rankings of World Universities. Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS). Leiden University, the Netherlands. CWTS Report 2006-01, 40 pp.

Thelwall, M., (2004), “Link Analysis: An Information Science Approach”, Amsterdam and Boston; Elsevier Academic.

(Accessed 20.12.2009(.

World Bank, 2007 ()

Wouters, P., Reddy, C. and Aguillo, I., (2006), “On the Visibility of Information on the Web; An Exploratory Experimental Approach”, Research Evaluation, 15 (2), pp: 107-117.

Scharnhorst, A. and Woulters, P., “Web Indicators-A New Generation of S&T Indicators?” Cybermetrics, 10, (1).

Zitt, M. and Filliatreau, G., (2007), “Big is (Made) Beautiful – Some Comments about the Shanghai Ranking of World Class Universities”, in Sadlak J. and Liu, N.J. Eds. The World-Class University and Ranking: Aiming Beyond Status. Bucharest, Shanghai, Cluj-Napoca: UNESCO-CEPES, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Cluj University Press, pp: 147-165.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download