Abstract
Global university rankings continue to gain growing interest and
have high visibility from all stakeholders. Of these, Webometrics
Ranking (WR) faces many criticisms about its function. Some people
believe WR evaluates only the universities’ websites but not their
global performance and impact, as WR authors mentioned. This
stimulates us to examine the idea of using WR as a reliable academic ranking for
world universities. We apply the WR results with two widely accepted indexes to
test this hypothesis, i.e., the global university rankings and the bibliometrics.
Therefore, the WR ranking of the Top 100 institutions is correlated with the
corresponding values of six world ranking systems’ 2015 edition (ARWU, USNWR,
QS, THE, NTU, and URAP) that commonly accepted to evaluate the academic
performance of the university, as well as with the objectively bibliometric
indicators gathered from the Web of Science (WOS) In Cites TM - Thomson Reuters.
The findings revealed that the WR results provide a good correlation with both
ranking systems’ results and with 12 bibliometric variables, namely: WOS
Documents, Times Cited, Citation Impact (CI), Citation Impact: Category
Normalized (CNCI), Citation Impact: Journal Normalized (JNCI), Impact Relative to
World, Percent of Top 1% Documents, Percent of Top 10% Documents, Highly
Cited Papers, h-index, International Collaborations, and Percent Industry
Collaborations. WR and the studied six rankings’ consistency increases with
increasing the weight percent of the research or bibliometric indicators in these
PAKISTAN JOURNAL OF INFORMATION MANAGEMENT & LIBRARIES (PJIM&L) 103
https://doi.org/10.47657/2631
Vol.22 Shehatta, Al-Rubaish & Mahmood (2020)
six global rankings. Moreover, the consistency between WR and survey-based
rankings (USNWR, THE, and QS) increases with decreasing the weight of
subjective reputation survey indicators. The extremely high visibility characterizes
the North American, especially USA universities in WR and the studied seven
global rankings. Thus, web-based indicators ranking (WR) offers comparable and
similar quality to those of the six major global university rankings. Accordingly,
they can rank institutional academic performance. Moreover, the reliability could
be enhanced if each university has only one web-domain that accurately reflects
its actual performance and activity.We recommend all institutions apply all
ranking systems together since their criteria and indicators complement each
other and form a comprehensive index for covering various HEIs activities or
functions worldwide.
Ibrahim Shehatta, Abdullah M. Al-Rubaish, Khalid Mahmood. (2020) Ranking Web of Universities: Is Webometrics a Reliable Academic Ranking?, Pakistan Journal of Information Management and Libraries, Vol 22, Issue-1.
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