World Universities’ ranking on the Web: top 4000 World Ranking.
Webometrics here we come. A league table which seems to be a new one on the block. 4,000 institutions are ranked with the top 10 as follows:
1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2 Stanford University
3 Harvard University
4 University of California Berkeley
5 Cornell University
6 University of Michigan
7 California Institute of Technology
8 University of Minnesota
9 University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
10 University of Texas Austin
All from the USA
The outline of the method is as follows:
Ranking purpose and target groups. Webometrics Ranking is measuring the volume, visibility and impact of the web pages published by universities, with special emphasis in the scientific output (referred papers, conference contributions, pre-prints, monographs, thesis, reports, …) but also taking into account other materials (courseware, seminars or workshops documentation, digital libraries, databases, multimedia, personal pages, …) and the general information on the institution, their departments, research groups or supporting services and people working or attending courses.
There is a direct target group for the Ranking which are the university authorities. If the web performance of an institution is below the expected position according to their academic excellence, they should reconsider their web policy, promoting substantial increases in the volume and quality of their electronic publications.
The Top 10 in Europe shows something of a gap opening up with North America:
1 University of Cambridge World Rank: 28
2 Swiss Federal Institute of Technology WR: 40
3 University of Oxford WR: 42
4 University of Helsinki WR: 58
5 University of Oslo WR: 60
6 University of Edinburgh WR: 65
7 University College London WR: 68
8 Utrecht University WR: 71
9 University of Manchester WR: 82
10 Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden) WR: 84
Since you ask, the University of Nottingham is about 108 in Europe, 291 in the world.
Will this gain a foothold? Difficult to tell.
