Abstract:

This paper will explain and show the ranking methodology for university Web sites, identify its strengths and weaknesses, and estimate its significance and application in the future. At the beginning, we will discuss the Webometrics methodology, which is used for ranking of academic institutions, by taking into account several indicators for the academic domain, such as: size (S), which represents the number of pages recovered from four search engines - Google, Yahoo, Live Search and Exalead, visibility (V), which represents the total number of unique external links received by a site, "rich files" (R), a number of files in the formats: Adobe Acrobat (. pdf) Adobe Postscript (. ps) Microsoft Word (. doc) and Microsoft Powerpoint (. ppt), and finally "Scholar" (Sc) - number of papers and citations for the academic domain obtained through the Google Scholar service. Using the example of the University of Belgrade, we will demonstrate the impact of various factors on the position in the ranking and analyze changes of the rank over the past years, in order to draw some conclusions on further measures necessary to improve the ranking. A detailed analysis of Web sites of the University member institutions (31 faculties and 11 institutes) will be shown, firstly based on the methodology similar to the one applied by the Webometrics, and secondly by inspecting the Web sites of the institutions and determining the functional quality of individual sites. In this way, we will present a realistic view of the current state and quality of presence on the Internet for member institutions of the University of Belgrade from various fields, such as humanities, technical disciplines, sciences, medical schools etc. Based on this research, we will make some proposals and set the directions in which the development of Web sites should be moving in our academic environment.

Keywords:

University, Webometrics, ranking.