Webometrics Ranking of World Universities: January 2019

The Webometrics Ranking of World Universities is released annually by the Spanish Cybermetrics Lab, part of the National Research Council of Spain. This rating has been issued since 2004 and is published twice a year (end of January - beginning of February and end of July - beginning of August).

More than 28,000 world universities were assessed while compiling the latest issue of the rating as of January 2019. The ranking was published for more than 12,000 universities (filtering by country allows you to get acquinted with the world and national positions of its universities that are not included in the published part of the rating).

The rating methodology is based on an analysis of university representation in global information space. The Webometrics project creators consider their main task to assist universities in publishing scientific achievements and presenting them to a wide audience.

The rankings methods of the last issue have not changed significantly. The following indicators were used in its compilation:

In the January 2019 issue of the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities, only three of the top 20 universities were located outside the United States. This is University of Oxford (4th position), University of Cambridge (11th position), University of Toronto (19th position).

Top-20 Webometrics Ranking of World Universities, January 2019

ranking	University	Det.	Country	Presence Rank*	Impact Rank*	Openness Rank*	Excellence Rank*
1	Harvard University			38	2	1	1
2	Stanford University			61	3	2	3
3	Massachusetts Institute of Technology			42	1	4	11
4	University of Oxford			1	14	10	4
5	University of California Berkeley			109	4	3	16
6	University of Michigan			68	7	13	5
7	University of Washington			139	6	43	7
8	Cornell University			77	5	35	22
9	Columbia University New York			136	9	16	13
10	University of Pennsylvania			130	12	32	15
11	University of Cambridge			102	18	6	10
12	(2) Johns Hopkins University			278	39	42	2
13	University of California Los Angeles UCLA			176	16	23	12
14	Yale University			208	10	19	20
15	University of Wisconsin Madison			114	13	44	31
16	University of California San Diego			211	31	5	18
17	University of Minnesota System			147	17	38	33
18	(2) Pennsylvania State University			92	11	80	47
19	University of Toronto			123	34	47	9
20	Duke University			151	27	12	21

The rating methodology is often subject to some changes. According to the rating editors, this trend is due to the main purpose of the rating, namely: encouraging universities to publish better information on the Internet. In this regard, all changes in the methodology are aimed at expanding the possibility of a more objective analysis of the content that the university publishes.

N.B:

► Exclusion of universities is reserved for diploma-mills, fake or doubtful institutions. Our decisions regarding not inclusion are final and we do not make any email exchange about these issues. However the absence of an institution could be due to an error, so please send to us information about the gaps or mistakes.

► Universities without full 24/7 webservers availability are excluded. Our criteria are not to rank those universities failing to answer our ping requests from our facilities to their servers during two consecutive month requests.

► As previously informed, we also changed our policy regarding the universities with two or more central web domains, a bad practice that it is going to be even more penalized than before. Until now, all the main web domains of the university were ranked, but only the one with the better web indicators was published, even if this was the old or the not-preferred one in the central homepage. This procedure is still applied when both domains maintain their independence, but if the old domain redirects to the new one, this will be the one ranked and published. As expected, this is having strong (negative) impact on a few universities.

Additional exclusion criteria

A few institutions, mostly religious affiliated "Colleges" in Philippines and Latin America are publishing web portals that cover all their education activities, including those from their Schools (Basic Education) and High Schools (Intermediate Education). It will be unfair to include in the Ranking these institutions for comparative purposes, even although most of the web contents were related to their Higher Education departments. We strongly advice these organizations to segregate with an independent domain their university-level activities if they wish to be included in future editions.

A total of 364 Russian universities entered the world ranking of Webometrics (in the top 12,000). All in all, 1160 Russian HEIs were ranked in the Webometrics ranking.

Russian version