La Salle ranks 2nd, falls behind UP-D in int’l web rankings

The top 10 Philippine universities in terms of web impact, presence, openness and excellence, according to the 2014 Webometrics.

DLSU stands at 2nd place among Philippine universities in terms of web rankings, according to the Spanish National Research Council’s Webometrics Ranking of World Universities 2014, released February 11, GMT +1. It fell short of UP-Diliman (UP-D), which garnered the highest web ranking among Philippine academic institutions.

DLSU rose from its 4th place rank last July 2013, while UP-D rose from 2nd place in the previous ranking. UP-Manila, which ranked 1st last July, fell to 4th place this January, while UP-Los Baños maintained its 3rd place standing in the web rankings.

The number of total higher educational institutions ranked increased to over 22,000, from 21,451 ranked in the July 2013 assessment. The Webometrics rankings, which began in 2004, bases its composite index variables on publicly-available web data, such as Google Scholar and internal university databases.

It assesses the web impact of academic institutions follows a composite indicator which consists of university visibility (50 percent of the grade) in terms of external inlinks that universities receive from third parties, while also accounting for its activity (the other 50 percent), which includes the total number of webpages hosted in its main webdomain, subdomains; the rich files it hosts in academic and institutional research repositories as found in dedicated websites, and its academic papers published in high impact international journals as provided by the research aggregator, the Scimago group.

The Council states that, “The objective is not to evaluate websites, their design or usability or the popularity of their contents according to the number of visits or visitors. Web indicators are considered as proxies in the correct, comprehensive, deep evaluation of the university global performance, taking into account its activities and outputs and their relevance and impact.”

It furthers that it uses link analysis for quality evaluation, which provides a more comprehensive analysis than more subjective citation analysis or global surveys, which are more often than not based on peer review and value judgment as compared to actual output.

National Taiwan University ranked 1st place among Asian universities, and is the 2nd university worldwide in terms of presence rank; last July’s top performer, the National University of Singapore, fell to 7th place. In terms of Asian rankings, UP-D ranks among the top 500 universities at 479th, while La Salle remains pegged at 598th.