The Ranking Web and the “World-Class” Universities
Isidro F. Aguillo, Enrique Orduña‐Malea · SensePublishers eBooks · 2013
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the new developments in the methodology used for building the Ranking Web of Universities, also called the Webometrics Ranking (WebR) . Contrary to other rankings that ignore caveats and shortcomings in order to maintain inter-year stability, the WebR ranking is evolving for improving the reliability of sources, the descriptive power of the quantitative indicators and the justification of unexpected or discrepant results. The paper intends to show that the WebR ranking offers not only a far larger coverage, including universities in emerging and developing countries, but an evaluation model that takes into account all the academic missions as a whole. The current emphasis on so-called world-class universities, basically research intensive institutions, offers a very narrow overview of the performance and impact of the academic systems of many countries. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.