Abstract:

Webometrics Ranking is developed to encourage academic web presence, supporting the open access initiatives for growing the transfer of scientific and cultural knowledge generated by the universities to the society. It evaluates the university global performance considering its activities and outputs and their relevance and impact across four web indicators: presence, impact, openness, and excellence. Other university rankings (i.e. Times Higher Education (THE) World University Ranking, QS World University Ranking) judge world class universities based on different core missions: teaching, research, knowledge transfer, international outlook, and employability.

The main objectives of this study are to evaluate and analyze the performance of:
(i) top 100 universities in THE and QS rankings, which do not exist in the top 100 in webometrics ranking, and
(ii) top 100 universities in webometrics ranking, which do not exist in the top 100 in THE and QS rankings.

The paper analyzes the characteristics of the list of the selected universities and determines the strengths and weaknesses of the universities and evaluate their performance based on the four web indicators. The study found that impact is the main weakness of the universities in the top 100 in THE and QS rankings, which do not exist in the top 100 in webometrics rankings. The number of external inlinks has the main influence on the performance of these universities based on the impact indicator.

Keywords:

Webometrics ranking, performance, web indicators.