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Webometrics Ranking of World Universities

Did you know it is the largest academic ranking of higher education institutions

The Webometrics Ranking of World Universities is an initiative by the Cybermetrics Lab i.e. a research group of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC), recognised as the largest Spanish public research body. Incepted in 2004, it intends to offer full coverage of Higher Education Institutions (HEI’s) irrespective of the country or discipline. Currently, it ranks 30,000 HEIs from more than 200 countries. It’s the 18th year of publication this year.

Indicators	Meaning	Methodology	Source	Weight
Visibility	Web contents impact	Number of external networks (subnets) linking to the institution's webpages (normalised and then average value)	Ahrefs Majestic	50%
Transparency (or openness)	Top cited researchers	Number of citations from Top 210 authors (excl. top 20 outliers)	Google Scholar Profiles	10%
Excellence (or scholar)	Top cited papers	umber of papers amongst the top 10% most cited in each one of the 26 disciplines of the full database Data for the five years: 2015-2019	Scimago	40%

The Ranking Web or Webometrics is known as the largest academic ranking of higher education institutions. It offers an independent, objective, and open scientific exercise for reliable, up-to-date, multidimensional, and useful information w.r.t performance of universities across the world every six months.

The main objective of the Ranking Web is to encourage open access to the knowledge produced by a university. The Ranking Web editors are scientists working in world-class public research institutions with considerable experience in metrics-guided evaluation. The rankings are a research project and changes in the methodology are in line with the new findings or the availability of sources. The next Webometrics Ranking is expected to come out in July 2022.

Top 20 universities by Webometrics Ranking (January 2021 Edition)

Rank	Institution	Location	Impact Rank	Openness Rank	Excellence Rank
1	Harvard University	US	1	1	1
2	Stanford University	US	3	2	2
3	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	US	1	4	10
4	University of California Berkeley	US	4	3	18
5	University of Michigan	US	9	10	7
6	University of Oxford	UK	15	7	4
7	University of Washington	US	6	64	9
8	Columbia University	US	8	8	13
9	Cornell University	US	5	15	24
10	University of Cambridge	US	19	5	12
11	University of Pennsylvania	US	13	11	14
12	Johns Hopkins University	US	17	35	8
13	University of California (LA)	US	18	9	15
14	Yale University	US	11	14	26
15	UCL University College London	UK	48	12	6
16	University of California-San Diego	US	27	6	19
17	University of Toronto	Canada	36	22	11
18	University of Wisconsin Madison	US	12	26	44
19	University of Minnesota System	US	14	20	39
20	Duke University	US	30	13	27