New edition: July 2020

Second edition of 2020: Web data collected during July 2020 (the 17^th year!)

          The July edition (2020.2.0 beta) is built with the indicators obtained during this month in order to maintain the freshness of the data of the most current and updated Ranking of Universities.

         This text is the most updated info about the ranking's methodology. It always supersedes the contents provided in the general Methodology. It is also relevant the info provided in the Notes section.

Contact Info

         IMPORTANT: Please, do NOT send anonymous requests using email accounts such gmail.com, yahoo.com or hotmail.com. We are not going to answer any of these messages. Twitter requests are not accepted.

         If you wish contact to EDITOR, my email address is isidro.aguillo@csic.es. You can check my experience and expertise about these topics accessing the scientific papers I authored as described in my Google Scholar Citations profile or in my OA repository profile.

         We warmly thank information about BAD PRACTICES, but we do not discuss specific ranks or comment on comparative results with other HEIs

         We devoted time for preparing this site contents explaining the ranking and its methodology. Please, as a courtesy, READ our texts before asking trivial questions already answered in this website.

Info provided here supersedes the contents provided in Methodology

          Please, take into account that the following information:

          - Spanish edition is no longer updated. Please refer to the English version.

          - 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.

Changes in the calculation of indicators

         Published figures are RANKS (lower is better), intended for showing individual performances, but they are not the values used in the calculations. Due to technical issues several key changes (marked in red) have been done, so the following tablae describes the current methodology:

PLEASE READ: A few practical facts about the Ranking

          Since 2004, the Ranking Web (or Webometrics Ranking) is published twice a year (data is collected during the first weeks of January and July for being public at the end of both months), covering more than 30 000 Higher Education Institutions worldwide. We 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, open access and transparency policy, promoting substantial increases of the volume and quality of their electronic publications.

        Data is collected between 1 and 20 of January or July, depending of the edition. Each variable is obtained at least two times during that period and the maximum value is chosen for discarding mistakes or errors. Volatility of search engines is very high, so figures can be different and not easily replicated if the search is performed days later. Google info is very geographically biased, so for our purposes the data are collected using the google.com mirror domain, English as language of the interface and Madrid (Spain) as location.

        Final publication is done about the END of January or July, usually not before the 28th. We reserve the right to correct minor errors, mainly those related to the names of institutions, but also specific problems with the data. As a general rule we do not discuss any figure or provide the raw values supporting specific ranks.

Bad practices

          The Webometrics Rank of a university is strongly linked to the volume and quality of the contents it publishes on the Web.

          During the last years we discovered and fight unethical practices intending to manipulate (improving) the ranks of certain universities. In many cases these bad practices are so serious that local authorities should be called, so we decided not to act unilaterally regarding these activities. Results for Presence and Visibility are showed AS THEY ARE COLLECTED and if you suspect any wrongdoing, please contact with the university head, local or national authorities and/or journalists.

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.