"Cybermetrics Lab", which is a research group that belongs to Spanish research body "Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)", has announced the January 2012 edition of "Webometrics Ranking of World Universities" at the beginning of February. Among the 20.300 universities that were evaluated and ranked, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Stanford University ranked the top three universities of the world.
Amongst the Turkish universities within the first 500, Middle East Technical University ranked 342nd, Istanbul Technical University ranked 434th, Gazi University ranked 471st and Ankara University ranked 488th. (The Webometrics Ranking of other Turkish universities can be accessed via this link.)
By ascending to 342nd place at January 2012, METU, which formerly ranked 493rd at the preceding July 2011 edition of the Webometrics Ranking, achieved great success.
Webometrics Rankings are created on the basis of the number of publicly available scientific content issued via the web by research units, availability of electronic resources and other web related activities of universities.
The aim of Webometrics Ranking is to increase the web based journal output of universities and to encourage them to use the web efficiently. Therefore, rather than assessing the academic success of universities, the interest of potential students in universities and the quality of journals written by the scholars, Webometrics focuses on universities’ publicity on the web and efficiency of their web use.
