INTRODUCTION TO WEBOMETRICS: QUANTITATIVE WEB RESEARCH FOR THE RANKING OF WORLD UNIVERSITIES; RESEARCH CENTERS AND HOSPITALS

Muammer KayaOsmangazi University, Technological Research Center (TEKAM)ESOGU-TEKAM, Eskişehir, TurkeyE-mail: mkaya@ogu.edu.tr

Ergun CetinOsmangazi University, Technological Research Center (TEKAM)ESOGU-TEKAM, Eskişehir, TurkeyE-mail: erguncetin@ogu.edu.tr

Andac SözeriAlcatelAlcatel, Turkey

─Abstract ─Webometric rankings of World’s top Universities, Research Centers and Hospitals from academic and scientific point of view are very important and informative. Since 2004, the ranking web is published twice a year covering more than 17000 Higher Education Institutions, 7000 Research Centers and 18000 Hospitals worldwide. Top 6000 Universities, Top 2000 Research Centers and Top 1000 Hospitals are ranked in the world. Web presence measures the activity and visibility of the institutions and it is a good indicator of impact and prestige of Universities, Research Centers and Hospitals. Rank summarizes the global performance of the Universities, Research Centers and Hospitals, provides information for candidate students, patients, researchers, physicians, managers, scholars and citizens in general, and reflects the commitment to the dissemination of scientific knowledge.

This paper gives a brief introduction to the webometric ranking methodology for world Universities, Research Centers and Hospitals. Comparisons for the top 500 Universities, 1000 Hospitals and 300 Research Centers are made. This paper also presents and reviews Turkey’s performance and position in webometric rankings for Universities, Research Centers and Hospitals in the world based on webometric data.

Turkey had 1-3 Universities in the Top 500, 5-8 Universities in the Top 1000 and 41-49 Universities out of 89 ranked Universities in the Top 3000 Universities between 2007 and 2009 in the world. Turkey was in the 36 th place in University webometric ranking in the world with 9 Universities in the Top 1000. From Turkey, there were 1 University in the Top 200 and 11 Universities in the Top 500 in the Europe in 2009. Turkey had 2 Research Center in the Top 200 and 3 Research Centers in the Top 2000 in the world in 2009. Turkey had only 1 Hospital in the Top 200 and 13 Hospitals in the Top 2000 in the world. Turkey’s country scoreboard was 44th place in the world in 2009.

Key Words: Webometric, Ranking, University ranking, Cybermetrics, Top Universities/Research Center/ Hospitals, Web Indicators.

JEL Classification: D-83, H75, I-21, I-23 and J-24.

1. INTRODUCTION

More and more scholars are turning to the internet to find scientific information and academic institutions are devoting more and more resources to improving their presence on the web. It is therefore of para-mount importance to take into consideration web publication not only as a primary tool for scholarly communication but as a true reflection of the overall organization and performance of universities/research centers. It is very surprising to discover that for many scholars web presence is not related to their academic duties and they are ignoring requests to contribute to the common effort. Given the huge and diverse audiences that web contents could reach even in developing countries at very modest cost, enhancing also the social role of the scientists. The academic web is a global source of expertise and also a means to communicate scientific and cultural achievements (Aguillo, Granadino, Ortega, and Prieto, 2005). The impact of electronic publications is far larger than that

obtained by traditional journals and books on paper. Websites are the most efficient and cheapest way for boosting all three academic missions: teaching, research and technology transfer. Lack of visibility on the web is leading to a worrying level of academic digital divide (Aguillo, Ortega and Fernandez, 2008).

The "Webometric Ranking of World Universities/Research Centers/Hospitals" is an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain. Since 2004, the Ranking Web is published twice a year (January and July), covering more than 17,000 Higher Education Institutions worldwide (www.webometrics.info). Web presence measures the activity and visibility of the institutions and it is a good indicator of impact and prestige of Universities. Rank summarizes the global performance of the University, provides information for candidate students and scholars, and reflects the commitment to the dissemination of scientific knowledge. Cybermetrics Lab is devoted to the quantitative analysis of the internet and Web contents specially those related to the processes of generation and scholarly communication of scientific knowledge. This is a new emerging discipline that has been called Cybermetrics or Webometrics. Webometric ranking intend to motivate 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 policy, promoting substantial increases of the volume and quality of their electronic publications.

1.1. Rankings and Web Ranking

Several research teams have been working on the development of web indicators from the mid-1990s, especially after the European Commission (EC) funded two projects, EICSTES (www.eicstes.org.) and WISER (www.wiserWeb.org. and www.Webindicators.org.). After realizing the importance of the search engines as the main intermediaries in the information access processes in the web (Wouters, Reddy, and Aguillo, 2006), new indicators (Scharnhorst and Wouters, 2006; Aguillo, Granadino, Ortega, and Prieto, 2006) were introduced to solve the problems derived from the instability of search engine results (Bar-Ilan, 2005) and the artifacts produced by the Web Impact Factor (Ingwersen, 1998). Using a worldwide catalogue of universities collected during the EICSTES Project and automatic procedures developed for WISER, a preliminary version of a web indicators-based ranking was published in 2004. This application of the cybermetric or webometric techniques does not differ from similar scientometric proposals, where bibliometric data is the core information used for the analysis (Thelwall, 2004). In fact, the application of quantitative methods to the analysis of scientific activities and scholarly communication has been a powerful tool for science policy and research evaluation. Most of the bibliometric indicators, such as the number and distribution of publications and citations, are easy to obtain. But the problem with this approach is that only a restricted number of the activities of the researchers or institutions are considered, since only formal publications are usually taken into account. In fact, scientometric tasks should be a multifaceted enterprise and more variables should be added to the analysis (Moed, 2006).

However, including additional aspects, especially when they are difficult to obtain and the data is very heterogeneous, could make the analysis complex and sometimes unfeasible when global scenarios are intended. Web publication is frequently questioned for the quality of the contents, not taking into account that besides research results published in prestigious journals, the same authors develop a wide range of activities reflected on the web pages. Teaching materials, raw data, drafts, slides, software, bibliographic or link lists are also relevant and inform about the commitment of professors to their students. The structure, composition, and all kinds of administrative information provided by the institution itself are very valuable. When this information is made publicly available through the web, it speaks of the high academic level of the university. The web is providing a comprehensive way to describe this wider range of activities where scientific publications are only one of components to be found on a website (Table 1) (Aguillo, Ortega and Fernandez, 2008).

A few years ago, many websites of even very important institutions were small, with little relevant information and without any added value. This is no longer the case and the top-level universities are publishing millions of pages produced by dozens of departments and services, hundreds of research teams and thousands of scholars. Strong web presence informs of a wide variety of factors that are clearly correlated with the global quality of the institution: widespread availability of computer resources, global internet literacy, policies promoting democracy and freedom of speech, competition for international visibility or support of open access initiatives, etc. Although an unknown fraction of the contents of a university domain are not academic, the patterns obtained are meaningful enough given the large numbers involved in the webometric analysis. In addition, granting access to and promoting web publication among faculty member’s means that other colleagues will be aware of the scientific results produced, more candidate students can learn about the university, companies can find suitable partners for industrial projects, and organizations can easily access contact data for experts. These and other reasons should be taken into consideration when supporting Open Access initiatives (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_ access.) intended to obtain institutional mandates for information web archiving.

Table1. Some Personal Activities Reflected in Personal WebPages

Research Technology Transfer TeachingRaw experimental data

New softwareConference slides/presentationsProjects, Grants, ScholarshipsProject development/final reportsBook chapters

Books, papers, monographs

PatentsDrafts, preprintsPeer reviews

Papers in local/university journals

Personal CVResearch Team descriptionPress notes and interviewsTV programmes

Thesis, dissertations

Organized events calls

Papers in prestigious journals

Multimedia

Workshop slidesBibliographysBureaucratic reports

Seminar slides/presentations

TextbooksBook reviewsWeb sites for e-learningAnswers for exams

1.2. Collecting Data

Counting a large number of web domains with huge numbers of pages can only be done automatically. One possibility is to use one of the available commercial or free crawlers, but tuning up these robots can be very difficult and they require important human and computer resources (Cothey, 2004). On the other hand, search engines already have well designed and tested robots; they frequently update their databases and they have automatic tools that can be customized with powerful operators for data extraction. Moreover, as search engines are the main intermediaries in web navigation, the presence of a domain in their databases is an indicator of visibility. Commercial search engines also have limitations, including inconsistent and rounded results, biases in geographical and linguistic coverage or frequent and opaque changes in their working procedures. To avoid some of these problems, several search engines are used together. The number of independent search engines with large databases is small and not all of them are usable for cybermetric purposes. They are Google (and Google Scholar), Yahoo Search, Live (but not Academic Live), Exalead and Alexa (Aguillo et al., 2006). Extracting values from search engines can be done with the help of operators, such as site, link or file-type. However not all the engines support the same options nor is the syntax ever the same. Unfortunately, both Google and Live are now not usable for hypertext analysis. On the other hand, Google PageRank and Alexa Traffic Rank can be recovered as relative positions values. An interesting option provided only by Yahoo search is the possibility to identify sub-domains for a certain domain although the results are usually very noisy.

1.3 Constructing the Ranking

The web has an important advantage over other systems as it is easier to identify the institutional units even if their names or locations are very similar. Usually each organization has a different web domain that can be used for recovering data from search engines. Unfortunately this is not universally the case, as a few universities have more than one main domain, use aliases or provide independent domains for some of their sub-units or services. In some cases there is no central domain or the central or unique domain refers only to a faculty or department. Most domains do not change over long periods, but sometimes institutions merge or split or merely adopt a new domain. These changes have a deep impact on the rankings as the number of external inlinks decreases abruptly. There are three key aspects to be measured in the academic web: Size, that is, volume of information published. Visibility, the number of ‘situations’ (site citations & external inlinks) the domain receives; and popularity as the number of visits or visitors of the web pages (Aguillo, Ortega and Fernandez, 2008).

Bibliometrics have traditionally ignored journal circulation and focused on impact, the ratio between number of citations and number of papers. A similar approach is proposed not only to make comparisons possible but also due to the methodological problems for obtaining trustworthy data of visits and visitors. A series of criteria are monitored, but only size (S) and visibility (V) are included in the final ranking. The model states that the ratio between both is 1:1, but in order to reflect the diversity of the academic contents, the size component is split into three to measure raw volume of pages, number of rich files (R), and number of papers collected by Google Scholar (Sc). The last two indicators are relevant as we intend to measure commitment to open access publication. According to the proposed model the ranking (WR) is obtained with the following formula:

WR = 2*Rank (S)+Rank (R)+Rank (Sc)+4*Rank (V)

The ratio combining the weights assigned to each element is (2+1+1):4 or 1:1 as intended. Other variants are also acceptable, but empirical tests show they provide results less comparable to other sources. In order to avoid size-related problems, search engines bias, and other factors, the absolute numbers collected were log-normalized, transformed in ordinals and then combined with the aforementioned formula for (WR) (Zitt and Filliatreau, 2007).

2. NUMBER OF NATIONAL DOMAINS

Germany had 80.1, United Kingdom (UK) 31.9 and Japan 23.4 millions national domains in 2009. Table 2 shows the Top 10 countries which have the highest number of domains in the world. Turkey had 1.16 million national domains and in the 36 th

place out of 240 countries in the world.

Table 2: Number of National Domains Ranking in the World

RANK COUNTRY NUMBER OF NATIONAL DOMAINS

1 Germany  (de) 80,100,0002 United Kingdom (uk) 31,900,0003 Japan (jp) 23,400,0004 Netherlands (nl) 17,400,0005 China  (cn) 15,000,0006 Russian Federation (ru) 14,900,0007 Poland (pl) 12,300,0008 Italy  (it) 12,200,0009 France  (fr) 8,170,00010 Brazil (br) 7,920,00036 Turkey (tr) 1,160,000236 Marshall Islands  (mh) 3237 Wallis And Futuna Islands (wf) 1238 Mayotte (yt) 1239 Montenegro (me)240 Svalbard and Jan Mayen Islands (sj)

3. WEBOMETRIC RANKING OF WORLD'S UNIVERSITIES

3.1. Objectives of the Webometric Ranking of World's Universities

Table 3 shows distribution of countries and ranked University numbers for webometric ranking in the world. In July 2009, totally 13074 Universities in 240 countries were ranked. 5022 Universities were in America, 3988 Universities in Europe and 3456 Universities were in Asia continent. Previously the top 3000 and 4000 Universities were ranked. The new edition, scheduled for late July 2009, ranks more universities in order to make consistent the world and regional rankings. That means that now the Top 6000 institutions are presented.

Table 3: Ranked University Distribution among Continents in the World by Webometric RankingCountries Universities

  AFRICA 58 512

  AMERICA 52 5.022

  ASIA 47 3.456

  EUROPE 57 3.988

  OCEANIA 26 96

The original aim of the ranking is to promote web publication. Supporting Open Access initiatives, electronic access to scientific publications and to other academic material are primary targets. However web indicators are very useful for ranking purposes too as they are not based on number of visits or page design but on the global performance and visibility of the universities. As other rankings focused only on a few relevant aspects, specially research results, web indicators based ranking reflects better the whole picture, as many other activities of professors and researchers are showed by their web presence. The

Web covers not only formal (e-journals, repositories) but also informal scholarly communication. Web publication is cheaper, maintaining the high standards of quality of peer review processes. It could also reach much larger potential audiences, offering access to scientific knowledge to researchers and institutions located in developing countries and also to third parties (economic, industrial, political or cultural stakeholders) in their own community. The Webometrics ranking has a larger coverage than other similar rankings (Table 4). The ranking is not only focused on research results but also in other indicators which may reflect better the global quality of the scholar and research institutions worldwide.

Webometric ranking intend to motivate 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 policy, promoting substantial increases of the volume and quality of their electronic publications. Candidate students should use additional criteria if they are trying to choose university. Webometric Ranking correlates well with quality of education provided and academic prestige, but other non-academic variables need to be taken into account.

Table 4: Comparison of the Main World Universities' Rankings

Source: www.webometrics.info

3.2. Coverage of the Webometric Ranking of World Universities

Table 5 summarizes the actual coverage of the ranking, in terms of number of countries and higher education institutions around the world. North America, Europe and Asia are the first three continents that have top Universities in the world, respectively.

Table 5: The Number of Universities in the Top 100, 200, 500 and 1000 according to Continents and Countries in July 2009.

Source: www.webometrics.info

3.3. Design and Weighting of Indicators

The unit for analysis is the institutional domain, so only universities, hospitals and research centers with an independent web domain are considered. If an institution has more than one main domain, two or more entries are used with the different addresses. The first Web indicator, Web Impact Factor (WIF), was based on link analysis that combines the number of external inlinks and the number of pages of the website, a ratio of 1:1 between visibility and size. This ratio is used for the ranking, adding two new indicators to the size component: Number of documents, measured from the number of rich files in a web domain, and number of publications being collected by Google Scholar database. Four indicators were obtained from the quantitative results provided by the main search engines as follows:

Size (S). Number of pages recovered from four engines: Google, Yahoo, Live Search and Exalead. For each engine, results are log-normalized to 1 for the highest value. Then for each domain, maximum and minimum results are excluded and every institution is assigned a rank according to the combined sum. The inclusion of the total number of pages is based on the recognition of a new global market for academic information, so the web is the adequate platform for the internationalization of the institutions. A strong and detailed web presence providing exact descriptions of the structure and activities of the university can attract new students and scholars worldwide.

Visibility (V). The total number of unique external links received (inlinks) by a site can be only confidently obtained from Yahoo Search. Results are log-normalized to 1 for the highest value and then combined to generate the rank. The number of external inlinks received by a domain is a measure that represents visibility and impact of the published material, and although there is a great diversity of motivations for linking, a significant fraction works in a similar way as bibliographic citation.

Rich Files (R). After evaluation of their relevance to academic and publication activities and considering the volume of the different file formats, the following were selected: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf), Adobe PostScript (.ps), Microsoft Word (.doc) and Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt). These data were extracted using Google, Yahoo Search, Live Search and Exalead. These data were extracted using Google and merging the results for each file type after log-normalizing in the same way as described before.The success of self-archiving and other repositories related initiatives can be roughly represented from rich file and Scholar data. The huge numbers involved with the pdf and doc formats means that not only administrative reports and bureaucratic forms are involved. PostScript and Powerpoint files are clearly related to academic activities.

Scholar (Sc). Google Scholar provides the number of papers and citations for each academic domain. These results from the Scholar database represent papers, reports and other academic items.

The four ranks were combined according to a formula where each one has a different weight but maintaining the ratio 1:1 (Table 6).

Table 6: Effects of Webometric Rank Weighting Factors

Source: www.webometrics.info

3.4. Top 50 Universities in the World

Table 7 shows the top 10 Universities in the World in July 2009. MIT, Harvard and Stanford are the first three Universities in USA and in the world. USA has 40 Universities in the Top 50. The Top 21 Universities are from the USA. England (Cambridge (22nd) and Oxford (42nd)), Japan (Tokyo (24th) and Kyoto (49th)) and Canada (Toronto (28th) and UBC (41st)) have 2 universities, Taiwan (National Taiwan University (26th)), Brazil (San Paulo (38th)), Mexico (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (44th)) and Switzerland (Swiss Federal Institude of Technology, ETH Zurich (46th)) have 1 Universities in the top 50 Universities in the world.

Table 7: Top 10 Universities in the world.

WORLD RANK UNIVERSITY COUNTRY  SIZE  VISIBILITY RICH FILES SCHOLAR           

1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2 1 1 7

2 Harvard University ** 7 2 12 1

3 Stanford University 4 4 2 24

4 University of California Berkeley 8 3 5 32

5 Cornell University 1 5 9 37

6 University of Wisconsin Madison 3 10 6 71

7 University of Minnesota 6 15 7 22

8 California Institute of Technology ** 18 6 20 30

9 University of Illinois Urbana Champaign * 17 7 13 51

10 University of Michigan 10 8 18 55

3.5. Top University Distribution by Countries in 2009

Table 8 shows countries which have more Universities in the Top 200, 500 and 1000. In this webometric ranking, the USA has 94 in the Top 200, 155 in the Top 500 and 296 Universities in the Top 1000. Germany has 14 in the Top 200, 49 in the Top 500 and 63 Universities in Top 1000. Canada, UK and Japan are also in the first fifth rank. Turkey is in the 36 th place with 1 university in the Top 500 and 8 Universities in the Top 1000.

Table 8: Distribution by Countries in the Top 200, 500 and 1000.

Distribution by Country

       

RANK COUNTRY Top 200 Top 500 Top 1000         

1 United States of America 94 155 2962 Germany 14 49 633 Canada 12 25 384 United Kingdom 10 36 705 Japan 7 13 506 Spain 6 27 437 Australia 6 13 288 Sweden 6 10 149 Taiwan 5 14 35

10 Brazil 5 12 3211 Italy 4 17 3812 Netherlands 4 12 1313 Switzerland 3 6 1014 Norway 3 4 415 Czech Republic 2 7 1036 Turkey 1 8

3.6. European University Ranking

Table 9 shows webometricly ranked Universities in European countries. Russian Federation has 694, France 597 and Germany 408 ranked Universities. Table 10 shows both top 10 Universities ranked in Europe and Turkish University positions in the Top 500 in Europe. METU is in the 191st, Bogazici University 236th and Bilkent University 276th place in European University ranking. There were 1 University in the Top 200 and 11 Universities in the Top 500 Universities in Europe from Turkey in 2009.

Table:9: The numbers of Universities ranked in European CountriesCountry University ranked Country University rankedAustria 67 Italy 201Belgium 160 Netherlands 134

G. Britain 236 Norway 70Bulgaria 55 Poland 436

Czech Republic 57 Portugal 114Denmark 137 Romania 86Greece 66 Russian Fed. 694Finland 53 Spain 218France 597 Sweden 55

Germany 408 Switzerland 104Israel 32 TURKEY 89

Table 10: University Ranking in Europe in July 2009.RANKING POSITION

EUROPE WORLD UNIVERSITY COUNTRY  SIZE  VISIB.  RICH FILES SCHOLAR           

1 22 University of Cambridge 26 13 70 862 42 University of Oxford 122 19 51 1573 46 Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zurich 84 49 76 434 51 University College London 100 39 59 1265 52 University of Helsinki ** 67 89 43 566 54 Norwegian University of Science & Technology 88 58 86 457 55 University of Oslo 62 67 39 1228 68 Universität Wien 130 87 57 679 69 Universidad Complutense de Madrid 108 110 185 5

10 71 University of Edinburgh 196 59 63 124

191 435 Middle East Technical University * 330 817 300 354236 510 Bogazici University 1,597 281 543 931276 630 Bilkent University 559 1,182 409 644327 765 Ankara University 698 1,442 930 379

355 828 Istanbul Technical University 753 1,608 534 724366 850 Sabanci University * 830 1,850 894 295383 903 Hacettepe University 940 1,611 657 792384 904 University of Anatolia 1,609 905 1,004 945418 1002 Agean University 1,127 1,663 711 970430 1050 Gazi University 617 2,560 1,114 555474 1152 Inonu University Malatya 1,768 1,620 1,970 540

3.7. Rank of Universities in Turkey

In Turkey, totally 89 Universities were webometricaly ranked. Table 11 shows ranks of Unversities in Turkey in July 2009. METU is in the 425th, Bogazici University 510th, Bilkent 630th place in the world. Ankara, İstanbul Technical, Sabancı, Hacettepe and Anadolu Universities are in the Top 10 places. There are only one University in the Top 500, eight Universities in the Top 1000, twenty three Universities in the Top 2000 and forty nine in the Top 3000 Universities in the world. Between 2007 and 2009, in the webometric ranking of world Universities, Turkey had 1-3 Universities in the Top 500, 5-8 in the Top 1000 and 41-49 in the Top 3000 in the world (Kaya and Cetin, 2009)

3.8. Country Scoreboard

The Country Scoreboard has been designed following the model of the QS SAFE National System for evaluation of the countries' higher education system according to the presence of their Universities in the Top 500 of the Ranking Web. Four normalized indicators are used with equal weighting as follows:

System: Number of universities in the Top 500 in the given country, divided by the mean position of those institutions.

Access: A score built according to ranks (5 points for a university in the top 100, 4 points for 101-200, 3 points for 201-300, 2 for 301-400 and 1 for 401-500) divided by the population size (root of the population in thousands) of the country (World Bank, 2007).

Flagship: A normalized score (100 for positions 1-20, 96 for 21-40, and so on) based on the leading university rank for countries with institutions among the Top 500.

Economic: Same score as the access defined before but divided by the GDP (PPP) per capita for the country in question (World Bank, 2007).

Table 11: Rank of Universities in Turkey in 2009.

Rank of Universities in Turkey

      POSITION

WORLD RANK UNIVERSITY    SIZE  VISIBILITY  RICH FILES  SCHOLAR

           435 Middle East Technical University *   330 817 300 354510 Bogazici University   1,597 281 543 931630 Bilkent University   559 1,182 409 644765 Ankara University   698 1,442 930 379828 Istanbul Technical University   753 1,608 534 724850 Sabanci University * 830 1,850 894 295903 Hacettepe University 940 1,611 657 792904 University of Anatolia 1,609 905 1,004 9451002 Agean University 1,127 1,663 711 9701050 Gazi University 617 2,560 1,114 5551152 Inonu University Malatya 1,768 1,620 1,970 5401256 Istanbul University   1,540 1,903 1,059 1,1821306 Dokuz Eylul University   508 2,896 873 1,4961364 Erciyes University   1,065 1,962 1,416 1,5131475 Cukurova University   1,657 3,021 1,440 7641569 Selcuk University   3,265 2,903 958 9801570 Istanbul Bilgi University   442 2,566 1,228 2,8321680 Uludag University   1,834 3,184 1,611 1,0861791 Karadeniz Technical University   1,978 2,145 2,115 1,9171869 Yildiz Technical University   2,484 3,495 1,412 1,2721935 Koc University   2,524 4,043 1,106 1,383

1976 University of Gaziantep   1,608 3,892 1,596 1,5511995 Suleyman Demirel University Turkey   2,072 3,983 1,797 1,2182074 Trakya University   1,735 4,220 2,124 1,3022130 Fatih University   1,440 4,239 1,621 1,8852155 Canakkale Onsekyz Mart University   3,001 2,650 2,363 1,9522190 Sakarya University   1,858 4,038 1,818 1,8082203 Tobb University of Economics and Technology   2,944 2,683 2,438 2,0822208 Ataturk University   2,136 3,284 5,162 9842233 Marmara University   2,445 2,857 2,092 2,5162243 Afyon Kocatepe University   4,401 2,504 1,737 2,3332281 Istanbul Kultur University   3,888 3,188 2,632 1,4602305 University of Mersin   2,147 4,718 2,547 1,2612313 Akdeniz University   1,982 3,530 2,038 2,4622347 Cumhuriyet University   3,669 4,815 2,470 9222349 Kahramanmaras Sutcu Imam University   2,717 2,808 4,202 1,7342367 Baskent University   2,329 3,656 1,288 3,1472430 Izmir Institute of Technology *   3,122 4,920 2,159 1,2902442 Ondokuz Mayis University   3,266 4,807 2,650 1,1272443 Eskisehir Osmangazi University   2,256 3,552 2,202 2,6492474 Atilim University   3,483 3,999 1,798 2,0092533 Firat University   3,819 5,103 2,522 1,0882585 University of Yuzuncu   3,076 4,404 3,263 1,4522601 Kocaeli University   3,128 4,003 2,154 2,3322638 Pamukkale University   4,858 2,418 2,723 2,9372763 Cankaya University   3,289 4,197 2,489 2,3852828 Yeditepe University   5,007 4,813 1,463 2,1652841 Balikesir University   3,401 4,477 2,245 2,4952862 Adnan Menderes University   3,299 4,219 2,616 2,5473035 Dicle University   5,576 4,643 2,720 1,740

Table 12 shows country scoreboard for the top 45 countries in the world. USA, UK, Germany, Canada and Taiwan are the first five countries. In this category Turkey is in the 44th place in the world with overall 26 score points out of 100.

Table 12: Country Scoreboard in 2009.

Country Scoreboard

Rank Country System Access Flagship Economic Overall1 United States 100 100 100 100 1002 United Kingdom 74 91 96 98 903 Germany 83 95 84 96 894 Canada 71 95 96 62 815 Taiwan 52 74 96 90 786 Sweden 49 84 88 74 747 Spain 62 82 88 57 728 Japan 52 42 96 70 659 Brazil 51 35 96 79 6510 Netherlands 50 76 88 39 6311 Switzerland 44 66 92 50 6312 Australia 50 70 88 43 6313 Norway 43 67 92 44 6114 Italy 51 50 88 51 6015 Finland 42 64 92 38 5916 Austria 42 52 88 36 5417 Czech Republic 42 53 84 36 5418 Hong Kong, China 41 53 84 35 5319 Belgium 42 50 84 36 5320 Denmark 41 58 76 36 5321 Portugal 42 46 72 38 4922 China 42 22 80 51 49

23 Mexico 40 25 92 35 4824 Israel 41 47 68 35 4825 France 43 31 76 35 4626 Ireland 39 43 68 34 4627 Singapore 38 33 68 32 4328 Korea, Rep. 41 30 64 35 4229 Thailand 40 26 68 33 4230 Saudi Arabia 38 26 64 33 4031 Hungary 39 34 56 33 4032 Slovenia 37 32 60 31 4033 Chile 38 25 56 40 4034 Russian Federation 37 22 64 31 3935 Poland 40 28 44 38 3736 Estonia 37 35 44 31 3737 Serbia 37 26 44 34 3538 Argentina 37 22 44 33 3439 Greece 38 28 36 34 3440 New Zealand 37 25 40 31 3341 Iceland 37 30 20 31 2942 Costa Rica 37 25 24 31 2943 South Africa 37 21 20 31 2744 Turkey 37 20 16 31 2645 Colombia 37 21 12 31 25

4. WEBOMETRIC RANKING OF RESEARCH CENTERS

Webometric world research center ranking covers more than 7,000 organizations worldwide, with their own web domains or subdomains. The Top 2000 includes those institutions ranked according to their activities and visibility in the Web which is an indicator of their impact and prestige. Rank summarizes the global performance of the institutes and centers, provides information for candidate researchers, and reflects the commitment to the dissemination of scientific knowledge. A summary of the current results (July 2009) sorted by continent is presented in Table 13. USA&Canada and Europe have most prestigious research laboratories in the world.

Table 13: Webometric Research Center Ranking Distribution according to Continents

Top 100 Top 200 Top 500USA & Canada 48 72 153

Europe 37 94 249Asia 11 23 62

International 1 2Oceania 2 2 9

Latin America 2 8 22Africa 1

Arab World 2

The major change introduced in the last edition relates to the way the composite index (World Ranking) is computed. To improve the measurement of the academic impact, the visibility indicator has been build giving extra importance to the external inlinks that do not come from generic domains (.com, .org, .net). Webometric ranking intend to motivate both institutions and scientists to have a web presence that reflect accurately their activities (http://research.webometrics.info/). If the web performance of an institution is below the expected position according to their academic excellence, scientific authorities should reconsider their web policy, promoting substantial increases of the volume and quality of their electronic publications.

4.1. Top 2000 Research Centers

Table 14 shows the Top 10 research centers in the world in 2009. Seven of them are in the USA. Three of them are in Europe (France, EU and Germany). Table 15 shows the position ranks of Turkish research centers in the Top 2000 in the world. There are only three research centers in the Top 2000 in the World. Tubitak is in the 102nd, Atatürk Training and Research Center

189th and Marmara Research Center (MAM) 1887th place in the World. In Europe, Tubitak is in the 38 th and Atatürk Training and Research Center 88th place.

Table 14: Top 10 Research Centers in the World in July 2009.WORLD RANK INSTITUTE COUNTRY SIZE VISIBILITY RICH FILES SCHOLAR

 1 National Institutes of Health 1 2 13 12 National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA 2 4 1 203 World Wide Web Consortium 11 1 30 2304 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 3 3 2 445 Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique CNRS 8 9 21 116 US Geological Survey 9 10 6 307 NASA Goddard Space Flight Center 6 12 3 808 European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN 22 19 8 159 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 83 7 14 2510 Max Planck Gesellschaft 7 15 16 27

Table 15: Turkish Research Centers in the Top 2000 in the World in July 2009.WORLD RANK RESEARCH CENTER SIZE VISIBILITY RICH FILES SCHOLAR

        102 Tubitak Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey   188 276 254 28189 Ataturk Training and Research Hospital   326 249 173 5721887 Marmara Research Center (MAM)   2,123 2,136 941 2,927

5. WEBOMETRIC RANKING OF HOSPITALS

The Cybermetrics Lab is publishing this Webometrics Ranking of World Hospitals from a purely academic point of view and as such it should be used. The Web indicators applied does not measure at all the quality of patient's treatment and health care offered by the hospitals included. So please be aware that if you are looking for the best place to treat a health condition this ranking is not appropriated for such a search. The Ranking Web of World Hospitals is introduced as a tool for showing the commitment of health organizations to the electronic publication and dissemination of academic information related to medicine. The Top Hospitals should be prone to share their information not only with other colleagues (physicians, researchers, scholars) but also with the rest of society, patients, community leaders, managers and citizens in general.

The Web indicators measure electronic contents, especially those used for scholarly communication, but also basic information about the hospital, its organization, services and personnel. The rank takes into account both the volume of information published and the impact or visibility of such contents measured by the number of external links the web pages receive from others. Surprisingly, many hospitals, even in the developed countries, have a poor presence in the Web or no presence at all. This lack of valuable contents publicly available is really very concerning and it is no longer acceptable in the 21st century. This new edition introduces some changes with respect to the January edition. The Directory has been updated and increased (there is now almost 18000 hospitals worldwide). To calculate the composite index (World Ranking).

Table 16 shows the Top 10 hospitals in the world. Eight of them are in the USA and two of them are in China in 2009. Table 17 shows Turkish hospitals in the Top 2000 in the world and in the Europe. Haydarpasa Gata Arastırma Hospital is in the 182th, Istanbul Universities Cerrahpasa Tıp Fak. Hastahanesi 224th and Acıbadem Hospital Group 272th place in the world. There are fourteen Turkish hospital in the Top 2000 hospitals in the world. There are also nine Turkish hospitals in the Top 500 hospitals in Europe.

Table 16: The Top 10 Hospitals in the World in 2009.    POSITION

WORLD RANK HOSPITAL COUNTRY SIZE VISIBILITY RICH FILES SCHOLAR

 1 University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston 12 35 2 42 University of Michigan Health System 5 18 5 253 University of Kansas Medical Center 8 39 3 54 NYU Langone Medical Center New York, NY 1 23 7 365 University of Virginia Health System 17 57 4 146 Vanderbilt Medical Center 10 27 11 337 Chang Gung Memorial Hospital * 33 31 27 88 Johns Hopkins Medicine 41 20 24 419 Taipei Veterans General Hospital * 68 68 32 310 University of Rochester Medical Center 13 58 10 50

Table 17: Turkish Hospital in the Top 2000 in the World and in the Top 500 in Europe.RANK

WORLD EU HOSPITAL SIZE VISIBILITY RICH FILES SCHOLAR           182 66 Haydarpasa Gata Arastirma Hastanesi   656 848 51 119224 83 Istanbul Universitesi Cerrahpasa Tip Fak. Hastanesi *   1,123 890 189 57272 99 Acibadem Hospital Group   536 92 5,039 779357 126 Ege University Medical School & Hospital   1,084 1,008 233 153477 166 Turkiye Hastanesi   8,042 19 11,207 2,200766 282 Anadolu Saglik Merkezi   1,350 619 1,141 2,200886 329 Isviçre Hastanesi   11,217 65 11,207 2,2001030 395 Acibadem International   4,287 379 7,534 1,4971201 466 Ankara Saglik Müdürlügü   1,908 1,710 435 2,2001285 Hacettepe Universitesi Hastaneleri   838 968 9,891 2,2001438 Memorial Hospital   684 1,640 4,559 2,2001532 Kayseri Egitim Ve Arastirma Hastanesi   3,357 1,148 1,955 2,2001852 Dunya Göz Hastanesi Grup World Eye Centers   2,083 1,436 9,166 1,497

6. CONCLUSIONS

Today the worldwide web (www) is one of the main sources of information and the main showcase for everyone (institutions, business enterprises, individuals, etc.) who wants to be recognized on in the ‘real world’. At the academic level, universities have a very important role as a means to communicate scientific and cultural achievements. Web publication by scholars is not only a tool for scholarly communication but it is also a means to reach larger audiences and in general a reflection of the performance of the institutions. There have been several efforts to develop web indicators that can ultimately lead to build an university’s rankings. This paper presented/reviewed the Webometric Ranking of World Universities which was built using a combined indicator called WR that takes into account the number of published web pages (S) (25%), the number of rich files, those in pdf, ps, doc and ppt format (R) (12.5 %), the number of articles gathered from the Google Scholar Database (Sc) (12.5%) and the total number of external inlinks (V) (50 %). The results showed that there was a larger than expected academic digital divide between higher education, research and hospital institutions in the United States and the European Union and those in Turkey. US universities, research centers and hospitals are far bigger and better than European and Turkish counterparts. This kind of rankings using web indicators should be used to measure universities’ performance in conjunction with more traditional academic indicators.

If the web performance of an institution is below the expected position according to their academic excellence, university, research center and hospital authorities should reconsider their web policy, promoting substantial increases of the volume and quality of their electronic publications.

Turkey has 1-3 Universities in the Top 500, 5-8 Universities in the Top 1000 and 41-49 Universities out of 89 ranked Universities in the Top 3000 Universities in the world between 2007 and 2009. Turkey was in the 36 th place in University webometric ranking in the world with 9 Universities in the Top 1000. Turkey has 1 University in the Top 200 and 11 Universities in the Top 500 in the Europe. Turkey has 2 Research Center in the Top 200 and 3 Research Centers in the Top 2000 in the world. Turkey has only 1 Hospital in the Top 200 and 13 Hospitals in the Top 2000 in the world. Turkey’s country scoreboard is 44th place in the world. Turkey’s position in webometric University, Research Center and Hospital rankings are not in the desired level. Turkey’s Universities, Research Centers and Hospital should spent more afford, money and time to reach much better positions in the world webometric rankings in order to be recognized in the world. Turkish institutions worldwide adopt a strong web policy.

Turkey’s webometrically best Universities are METU, Bogazici ve Bilkent Universities; webometrically best Research Centers are TUBITAK, Atatürk Training and Research Hospital and TUBITAK-MAM and Turkey’s webometrically best Hospitals are Haydarpaşa GATA, İstanbul Üniversitesi Cerrahpasa Tıp Fak. And Acıbadem Hospital Group.

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