TRANSPARENT RANKING: Top Universities by Citations in Top Google Scholar profiles

Tenth Edition (July 2020 version 10.1.2)

          Following the request of many universities, we decided not to use temporally the Google Scholar Citations (GSC) institutional profiles in this edition. GS is still working for extending their coverage, but unfortunately their resources are limited and there is no final date for finishing the task. The number of profiles is over 5000, but it is far for covering our full directory. We are still committed to the use that key source, but in the meantime we are collecting citations for the lists obtained from filtering GSC profiles by the (main and only the main) institutional web domains used in the Ranking Web (email domains in GSC).

PLEASE READ THIS INFORMATION FIRST

          The data, as in previous editions, is still in BETA, but when cleaned it will be used as the Transparent (Openness) indicator of the next edition of the Ranking Web of Universities scheduled for the END OF JULY 2020. There are a few methodological changes that are very relevant:

          1. We strongly advice to use normalized (official) name of the university in the affiliation and the INSTITUTIONAL email address. We are using the domain of the email addresses for filtering the profiles and data in GS Citations. When institutional profiles get updated and enlarged we will use them instead, so it is important to standardize names and affiliations for the future.

          2. Citations from the top 210 public profiles of each university are collected. This number of profiles is for allowing size independent comparisons. The top twenty (20) profiles of the list is EXCLUDED for improving representativeness by removing outliers. For the rest of the top profiles, the number of citations are added and the institutions are ranked in descending order of this indicator.

          3. IMPORTANT: Non individual profiles (journals, departments, groups) included in the top 210 results are penalized with the EXCLUSION of the whole institution (citation count equals to zero).

.         4. If there are several entries (duplicates) for the same author, only the best profile is used. That behavior penalizes organizations that are not cleaning duplicates, because then less than the total number of profiles would be taken into account.

          5. NOT ENFORCED YET. Entries without author names in roman characters can be excluded, so please include transliterated (English) version with the name in local alphabet. Don't add degrees, academic positions or department affiliation after the name.

          6.  BAD PRACTICES. If profiles of authors not belonging to the University are added intentionally to increase its rank, the institution will be EXCLUDED of the ranking. The exclusion is not enforced if it affects to the top 10 profiles, but intended bad practices could be penalyzed at our discretion.

          7. The figures are valid only at the time of collection (around July 5-18th 2020) . We don`t comment on the numbers or absences. This version consist only of Top entries (citations>1000), about 3 800 instititutions, but we will use non-zero values for about an additional 2 000 institutions.

          8. A few universities have two main web domains -marked as (1)- and both domains are showed here, but only the best global ranked is included in the main ranking

      To set up an personal profile in Google Scholar Citations database is voluntary, but once it is made public the responsibility for info correctness belongs to the author. GSC automatically updates the profiles, that although very practical sometimes it adds non-pertinent records and citations to the profile. Authors should be aware of these issues and clean their profiles periodically. Also institutions should monitor their members profiles for intended (or unintended) fake, incorrect or duplicate records. This is key for the ranking as any institution with these problems can be excluded from future editions of the ranking. Please, contact directly with Google Scholar for any aspect related with its database or profiles.

Please contact isidro.aguillo regarding errors or corrections before the publication of the main Ranking