The Webometrics ranking system measures how strongly a university is present in the web. It takes into account the global volume of contents published on the university domain and the visibility and impact of these publications.
The ranking is published twice a year (January and July) by the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid.
In the Latin American ranking UCR obtained the 11th position, moving up from position 16, and it was the only university from Central America that made it into the top 50.
In the rank by country, UCR took the first position, followed by Universidad Nacional (1331), Centro Agronomico Tropical y de Investigacion y Enseñanza (2009), University for Peace (2711) and Universidad Estatal a Distancia (3231).
According to Dr. Henning Jensen Pennington, Rector of the University of Costa Rica, the university’s improvement in the ranking is the result of constant efforts to digitalize its academic production and thus make it available to the world community.
In addition, Dr. Pennington stated that the large number and high quality of scientific publications available on the web of UCR results in greater visibility in the international context and, therefore, higher interest from academic peers in other parts of the world.
The Webometrics Ranking has been published since 2004, covering more than 20,000 Higher Education Institutions around the world. Its goal is to encourage 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.” says the report.
For the July 2012 edition, the composite indicator was built as follows: presence (20%), impact (50%) openness (15%) and excellence (15%).
To see the full list go to http://www.webometrics.info/index.html
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