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 (www.webometrics.info). 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 (www.eicstes.org.) and WISER (www.wiserWeb.org. and
www.Webindicators.org.). 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 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_ access.) intended to obtain
institutional mandates for information web archiving.
Table1. Some Personal Activities Reflected in Personal WebPages
Research
Raw experimental data
 Technology Transfer 
Teaching
Multimedia
Personal CV
Research Team description
Press notes and interviews
TV programmes
New software
Conference slides/presentations
Projects, Grants, Scholarships
Project development/final reports
Book chapters
Workshop slides
Bibliographys
Bureaucratic reports
Thesis, dissertations
Books, papers, monographs
Organized events calls
Seminar slides/presentations
Textbooks
Book reviews
Web sites for e-learning
Answers for exams
Patents
Drafts, preprints
Peer reviews
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
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
36
236
237
238
239
240
NUMBER OF NATIONAL
DOMAINS
80,100,000
31,900,000
23,400,000
17,400,000
15,000,000
14,900,000
12,300,000
12,200,000
8,170,000
7,920,000
1,160,000
3
1
1
COUNTRY
Germany (de)
United Kingdom (uk)
Japan (jp)
Netherlands (nl)
China (cn)
Russian Federation (ru)
Poland (pl)
Italy (it)
France (fr)
Brazil (br)
Turkey (tr)
Marshall Islands (mh)
Wallis And Futuna Islands (wf)
Mayotte (yt)
Montenegro (me)
Svalbard and Jan Mayen Islands (sj)
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
58
Universities
512
AMERICA
52
5.022
ASIA
47
3.456
EUROPE
57
3.988
OCEANIA
26
96
AFRICA
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
Source: www.webometrics.info
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.
Source: www.webometrics.info
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
Source: www.webometrics.info
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
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2
1
1
7
2
Harvard University **
7
2
12
1
3
Stanford University
4
4
2
24
4
University of California Berkeley
8
3
5
32
5
Cornell University
1
5
9
37
6
University of Wisconsin Madison
3
10
6
71
7
University of Minnesota
6
15
7
22
8
California Institute of Technology **
18
6
20
30
9
University of Illinois Urbana Champaign *
17
7
13
51
10
University of Michigan
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 36 th 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
RANK
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
36
COUNTRY
United States of America
Germany
Canada
United Kingdom
Japan
Spain
Australia
Sweden
Taiwan
Brazil
Italy
Netherlands
Switzerland
Norway
Czech Republic
Turkey
Top 200
Top 500
Top 1000
94
14
12
10
7
6
6
6
5
5
4
4
3
3
2
155
49
25
36
13
27
13
10
14
12
17
12
6
4
7
1
296
63
38
70
50
43
28
14
35
32
38
13
10
4
10
8
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
Austria
67
Italy
Belgium
160
Netherlands
G. Britain
236
Norway
Bulgaria
55
Poland
Czech Republic
57
Portugal
Denmark
137
Romania
Greece
66
Russian Fed.
Finland
53
Spain
France
597
Sweden
Germany
408
Switzerland
Israel
32
TURKEY
University ranked
201
134
70
436
114
86
694
218
55
104
89
Table 10: University Ranking in Europe in July 2009.
RANKING
EUROPE
WORLD
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
22
42
46
51
52
54
55
68
69
10
71
191
236
276
327
355
366
383
384
418
430
474
435
510
630
765
828
850
903
904
1002
1050
1152
UNIVERSITY
POSITION
SIZE
VISIB.
University of Cambridge
University of Oxford
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zurich
University College London
University of Helsinki **
Norwegian University of Science & Technology
University of Oslo
Universität Wien
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
26
122
84
100
67
88
62
130
108
13
19
49
39
89
58
67
87
110
70
51
76
59
43
86
39
57
185
University of Edinburgh
196
59
63
330
1,597
559
698
753
830
940
1,609
1,127
617
1,768
817
281
1,182
1,442
1,608
1,850
1,611
905
1,663
2,560
1,620
300
543
409
930
534
894
657
1,004
711
1,114
1,970
Middle East Technical University *
Bogazici University
Bilkent University
Ankara University
Istanbul Technical University
Sabanci University *
Hacettepe University
University of Anatolia
Agean University
Gazi University
Inonu University Malatya
COUNTRY
RICH FILES SCHOLAR
86
157
43
126
56
45
122
67
5
124
354
931
644
379
724
295
792
945
970
555
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
POSITION
WORLD
RANK
435
510
630
765
828
850
903
904
1002
1050
1152
1256
1306
1364
1475
1569
1570
1680
1791
1869
1935
1976
1995
2074
2130
2155
2190
2203
2208
2233
2243
2281
2305
2313
2347
2349
2367
2430
2442
2443
2474
2533
2585
2601
2638
2763
2828
2841
2862
3035
UNIVERSITY
Middle East Technical University *
Bogazici University
Bilkent University
Ankara University
Istanbul Technical University
Sabanci University *
Hacettepe University
University of Anatolia
Agean University
Gazi University
Inonu University Malatya
Istanbul University
Dokuz Eylul University
Erciyes University
Cukurova University
Selcuk University
Istanbul Bilgi University
Uludag University
Karadeniz Technical University
Yildiz Technical University
Koc University
University of Gaziantep
Suleyman Demirel University Turkey
Trakya University
Fatih University
Canakkale Onsekyz Mart University
Sakarya University
Tobb University of Economics and Technology
Ataturk University
Marmara University
Afyon Kocatepe University
Istanbul Kultur University
University of Mersin
Akdeniz University
Cumhuriyet University
Kahramanmaras Sutcu Imam University
Baskent University
Izmir Institute of Technology *
Ondokuz Mayis University
Eskisehir Osmangazi University
Atilim University
Firat University
University of Yuzuncu
Kocaeli University
Pamukkale University
Cankaya University
Yeditepe University
Balikesir University
Adnan Menderes University
Dicle University
SIZE VISIBILITY RICH FILES SCHOLAR
330
1,597
559
698
753
830
940
1,609
1,127
617
1,768
1,540
508
1,065
1,657
3,265
442
1,834
1,978
2,484
2,524
1,608
2,072
1,735
1,440
3,001
1,858
2,944
2,136
2,445
4,401
3,888
2,147
1,982
3,669
2,717
2,329
3,122
3,266
2,256
3,483
3,819
3,076
3,128
4,858
3,289
5,007
3,401
3,299
5,576
817
281
1,182
1,442
1,608
1,850
1,611
905
1,663
2,560
1,620
1,903
2,896
1,962
3,021
2,903
2,566
3,184
2,145
3,495
4,043
3,892
3,983
4,220
4,239
2,650
4,038
2,683
3,284
2,857
2,504
3,188
4,718
3,530
4,815
2,808
3,656
4,920
4,807
3,552
3,999
5,103
4,404
4,003
2,418
4,197
4,813
4,477
4,219
4,643
300
543
409
930
534
894
657
1,004
711
1,114
1,970
1,059
873
1,416
1,440
958
1,228
1,611
2,115
1,412
1,106
1,596
1,797
2,124
1,621
2,363
1,818
2,438
5,162
2,092
1,737
2,632
2,547
2,038
2,470
4,202
1,288
2,159
2,650
2,202
1,798
2,522
3,263
2,154
2,723
2,489
1,463
2,245
2,616
2,720
354
931
644
379
724
295
792
945
970
555
540
1,182
1,496
1,513
764
980
2,832
1,086
1,917
1,272
1,383
1,551
1,218
1,302
1,885
1,952
1,808
2,082
984
2,516
2,333
1,460
1,261
2,462
922
1,734
3,147
1,290
1,127
2,649
2,009
1,088
1,452
2,332
2,937
2,385
2,165
2,495
2,547
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 44 th place in the world with overall 26 score points out of 100.
Table 12: Country Scoreboard in 2009.
Country Scoreboard
Rank
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
Country
United States
United Kingdom
Germany
Canada
Taiwan
Sweden
Spain
Japan
Brazil
Netherlands
Switzerland
Australia
Norway
Italy
Finland
Austria
Czech Republic
Hong Kong, China
Belgium
Denmark
Portugal
China
Mexico
Israel
France
Ireland
Singapore
Korea, Rep.
Thailand
Saudi Arabia
Hungary
Slovenia
Chile
Russian Federation
Poland
Estonia
Serbia
Argentina
Greece
New Zealand
Iceland
Costa Rica
South Africa
Turkey
Colombia
System
100
74
83
71
52
49
62
52
51
50
44
50
43
51
42
42
42
41
42
41
42
42
40
41
43
39
38
41
40
38
39
37
38
37
40
37
37
37
38
37
37
37
37
Access
100
91
95
95
74
84
82
42
35
76
66
70
67
50
64
52
53
53
50
58
46
22
25
47
31
43
33
30
26
26
34
32
25
22
28
35
26
22
28
25
30
25
21
Flagship
100
96
84
96
96
88
88
96
96
88
92
88
92
88
92
88
84
84
84
76
72
80
92
68
76
68
68
64
68
64
56
60
56
64
44
44
44
44
36
40
20
24
20
Economic
100
98
96
62
90
74
57
70
79
39
50
43
44
51
38
36
36
35
36
36
38
51
35
35
35
34
32
35
33
33
33
31
40
31
38
31
34
33
34
31
31
31
31
Overall
100
90
89
81
78
74
72
65
65
63
63
63
61
60
59
54
54
53
53
53
49
49
48
48
46
46
43
42
42
40
40
40
40
39
37
37
35
34
34
33
29
29
27
37
37
20
21
16
12
31
31
26
25
4. WEBOMETRIC RANKING OF RESEARCH CENTERS
Webometric world research center ranking covers more than 7,000 organizations worldwide, with their own web domains or
subdomains. The Top 2000 includes those institutions ranked according to their activities and visibility in the Web which is an
indicator of their impact and prestige. Rank summarizes the global performance of the institutes and centers, provides
information for candidate researchers, and reflects the commitment to the dissemination of scientific knowledge. A summary
of the current results (July 2009) sorted by continent is presented in Table 13. USA&Canada and Europe have most prestigious
research laboratories in the world.
Table 13: Webometric Research Center Ranking Distribution according to Continents
USA & Canada
Europe
Asia
International
Oceania
Latin America
Africa
Arab World
Top 100
48
37
11
2
2
Top 200
72
94
23
1
2
8
Top 500
153
249
62
2
9
22
1
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 (http://research.webometrics.info/). 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.
WORLD
RANK
INSTITUTE
COUNTRY SIZE VISIBILITY
RICH FILES
SCHOLAR
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
National Institutes of Health
National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA
World Wide Web Consortium
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique CNRS
US Geological Survey
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Max Planck Gesellschaft
1
2
11
3
8
9
6
22
83
7
13
1
30
2
21
6
3
8
14
16
1
20
230
44
11
30
80
15
25
27
2
4
1
3
9
10
12
19
7
15
Table 15: Turkish Research Centers in the Top 2000 in the World in July 2009.
WORLD
RANK
102
189
1887
RESEARCH CENTER
SIZE VISIBILITY
Tubitak Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey
Ataturk Training and Research Hospital
Marmara Research Center (MAM)
188
326
2,123
276
249
2,136
RICH FILES
SCHOLAR
254
173
941
28
572
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
WORLD
RANK
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
HOSPITAL
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston
University of Michigan Health System
University of Kansas Medical Center
NYU Langone Medical Center New York, NY
University of Virginia Health System
Vanderbilt Medical Center
Chang Gung Memorial Hospital *
Johns Hopkins Medicine
Taipei Veterans General Hospital *
University of Rochester Medical Center
COUNTRY SIZE VISIBILITY RICH FILES SCHOLAR
12
5
8
1
17
10
33
41
68
13
35
18
39
23
57
27
31
20
68
58
2
5
3
7
4
11
27
24
32
10
4
25
5
36
14
33
8
41
3
50
Table 17: Turkish Hospital in the Top 2000 in the World and in the Top 500 in Europe.
RANK
WORLD EU
HOSPITAL
SIZE
VISIBILITY
182
224
272
357
477
766
886
1030
1201
1285
1438
1532
1852
66
83
99
126
166
282
329
395
466
Haydarpasa Gata Arastirma Hastanesi
Istanbul Universitesi Cerrahpasa Tip Fak. Hastanesi *
Acibadem Hospital Group
Ege University Medical School & Hospital
Turkiye Hastanesi
Anadolu Saglik Merkezi
Isviçre Hastanesi
Acibadem International
Ankara Saglik Müdürlügü
Hacettepe Universitesi Hastaneleri
Memorial Hospital
Kayseri Egitim Ve Arastirma Hastanesi
Dunya Göz Hastanesi Grup World Eye Centers
656
1,123
536
1,084
8,042
1,350
11,217
4,287
1,908
838
684
3,357
2,083
848
890
92
1,008
19
619
65
379
1,710
968
1,640
1,148
1,436
RICH FILES
SCHOLAR
51
189
5,039
233
11,207
1,141
11,207
7,534
435
9,891
4,559
1,955
9,166
119
57
779
153
2,200
2,200
2,200
1,497
2,200
2,200
2,200
2,200
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 44 th 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.
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