Guest post: Martin Ince
QS has been ranking the world’s universities for nearly a decade. Over that period we have used a range of measures to assess various aspects of university quality, including the informed opinion of academics and employers, indicators of their international reach, their research output and their commitment to teaching.
But our work on Latin American universities is unique in using another form of information on university performance, derived from the Webometrics ranking of university presence online.
The decision to use this measure was taken in consultation with higher education institutions and experts in the region, who agreed that it reflected an important aspect of university achievement that they thought worth capturing.
See the 2013 QS University Rankings: Latin America >
What can Webometrics tell us?
Like the QS World University Rankings, the Webometrics university ranking has appeared since 2004. The basic input to Webometrics is the web presence of about 21,000 universities and other institutions. These include research centers, government laboratories and similar organizations with a significant research output.
Of course, not everything on the web is accurate or even interesting. Webometrics itself does not judge the quality of the material it finds online. Instead, it regards online activity as inherently a good thing, promoting a free flow of information between universities and the rest of society.
It ranks their contribution partly by looking at the research output of institutions which can be found online, and partly by examining the links from these outputs to other organizations, including non-academic ones. Half of a university’s final score in Webometrics is based on external links, while the rest is drawn from its presence in high-impact publications, its visibility in open document repositories and its total number of web pages.
Latin American universities’ online presence
Because of the huge online presence of US institutions, the overall Webometrics rankings unsurprisingly start with American universities in the top 13 places, and the US takes 17 of the top 20 slots. From the UK, Cambridge and Oxford are 14th and 16th.
There is one Latin American university in the top 20, the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) in Brazil at 19, and another in the top 100, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) from Mexico in 36th position. Universities in the region tend to rate modestly on most Webometrics criteria, but do well in terms of their presence on open databases. São Paulo is third in the world on this measure and there are four Latin American universities in the top 10 by this criterion.
Our rankings show that the region’s top institutions vary widely in their online influence. Our second institution overall, the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, is 63rd in the Webometrics measure, 23 places below its position last year. If it had done as well as the 10th institution for web presence, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil, it would have come close to unseating São Paulo as the region’s top university.
Impact on universities’ overall ranking
There are other surprises lower down the table. While São Paulo and UNAM (1 and 6 in the overall QS University Rankings: Latin America) are the top two Latin American universities in Webometrics, the third, fourth and fifth institutions on this measure actually finished 21, 14 and 49 overall.
These results confirm the value of Webometrics scores in adding diversity to this ranking. For example our 49th-placed institution, the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Brazil, was fifth in the Webometrics rankings for Latin America in both 2012 and 2013. Apart from our measure of staff with a PhD, where Santa Catarina is 13th in the region, this is the only measure on which it scores well.
Santa Catarina’s success is also part of a picture of Brazilian success with Webometrics. There are 13 Brazilian institutions in the regional top 20 on this measure, plus two each from Mexico and Argentina and one each from Costa Rica, Colombia and Chile.
The Webometrics criterion is one on which Latin American universities can improve in coming years, so enhancing their overall standing in the QS University Rankings: Latin America. One approach, in line with developments elsewhere in the world, might be for universities to absorb free-standing research centers and business schools with a big online profile. The Webometrics results for Latin America suggest many possible candidates, such as Brazil’s rich array of independent research institutes in biology and the environmental sciences.