Notes (1,2,3,4)

The following Notes apply when one or several numbers in parenthesis appear before the name of an institution.

(1) Universities with two or more central webdomains:

  • This is a BAD PRACTICE that does not only penalize the rank of the universities, but it also significantly decreases their visibility in search engines and, far more important, their global internet impact.
  • We suggest that if a university is going to change its webdomain then the older one should be immediately and completely discarded.
  • IMPORTANT INFO: For the benefit of the institution, our policy is to rank all the domains but to publish only the best ranked domain, even if the selected one is the older or the no longer main webdomain. Any alternative domain should be discontinued AS SOON AS POSSIBLE (no redir, please)

(2) We are trying to maintain to a minimum the actions regarding merging/excluding of contents to individual domains:

  • Johns Hopkins University, its School of Medicine and other units with different domains are combined in the University entry, but its MUSE contents are subtracted. The different webdomains preserve their independent entry (marked as 3)
  • Jet Propulsion Laboratory website contents are added to the Caltech entry.
  • Tel Aviv University maintains a full copy of Arxiv that is excluded from its global size count
  • Data from the very large repository CiteSeerX has been excluded from the calculations related to the Pennsylvania State University and the University of Arkansas Fayetteville.
  • The same applies for the database DBLP regarding University of Trier in Germany, Dialnet regarding Universidad de La Rioja (Spain)

(3) Sub-units with independent web domain

  • BAD PRACTICE: Surprisingly, there are faculties, schools or even departments that maintain a web domain totally different to the university central one. This is a problem linked to the governance of the university but it is also provoking a relevant decrease of the web visibility for both the satellite and the whole university.
  • Same applies to the campuses with their own webdomain as there is no reason for not sharing the central webdomain even if they are in a different locality.

(4) Special situations

  • Universities that are providing only (online) distance learning. It also includes the Caribbean-based Schools of Medicine. Please, check carefully accreditation status of these institutions.