January, 2016
(Prof. Rudolf Scitovski, Prof. Marijana Zekić Sušac)
Webometrics ranking comprises about 25000 institutions of higher education around the world. It is prepared by The Cybermetrics Lab (Spanish National Research Council, CSIC), showing the influence of a university on the Internet.
The results of the ranking in Webometrics are published twice a year in January and July, and the University of Osijek is also included in this ranking list on which it strives for a better position, because this is one of ways to reach international recognition. Therefore, last year the University of Osijek published a special manual to present Webometrics and its activities to encourage better positioning in the context of criteria such as: web presence, openness and influence through networking.
Among the top 20 universities in the world, there are 16 American universities, two English, one Canadian and one Swiss university. For comparison, in 2014, in the first 27 places there were only two non-American (English) universities.
New position of Croatian universities on the world rank
New results as of January 2016 (see Table 1) show that the University of Split advanced the most (for 477 positions: from 1568th position to 1091st position), and the University of Osijek (for 201 positions: from 1825th position to 1624th position). The University of Rijeka advanced for 85 positions (from 1526th to 1441th position), and the University of Zagreb for 66 positions (from 458th position to the 392nd position). The University of Zadar made also significant progress, advancing for 278 positions (from 3653rd to 3375th position). The University of Dubrovnik advanced even for 1629 positions, and is now ranked at the 4520th position.
According to the new results (see Table 1), all four mentioned universities advanced on the rank, so one can state that the University of Zagreb is ranked among the best 2%, the University of Split is among the best 5%, and the University of Rijeka and the University of Osijek are ranked among the best 7%.
If we analyze the individual factors that affect the position of the University of Osijek in the Webometrics ranking, we can notice the increase of the Presence Rank (presence advanced for 842 positions) and Impact Rank (Impact: for 1091 position), which led to advancement of overall position of the University of Osijek in the world rankings for 201 positions. The ranking of some of our neighboring universities are to be also mentioned. In the world rankings, the University of Ljubljana occupies 214th position, the University of Maribor is at the 1107th position, the University of Pecs at the 896th position, and the University of Novi Sad is ranked 931st.
| Rank | World Rank | University | Presence Rank | Impact Rank | Openness Rank | Excellence Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 392 | University of Zagreb | 137 | 477 | 181 | 564 |
| 2 | 1091 | University of Split | 460 | 2767 | 1064 | 833 |
| 3 | 1441 | University of Rijeka | 505 | 2752 | 832 | 1641 |
| 4 | 1624 | Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek |
882 | 3159 | 711 | 1898 |
| 5 | 1624 | University of Zadar | 5205 | 5046 | 1423 | 3960 |
| 6 | 4520 | University of Dubrovnik | 8044 | 9180 | 3684 | 3654 |
Table 1. Part of the ranking list of Webometrics for Croatian universities, January 2016
Positions of Croatian universities on the European rank
The Webometrics rank follows 6051 European higher education institutions. This ranking also includes four Croatian universities that are among the 10% of best ranked. According to the results of July 2015, the University of Osijek is ranked at the 670th position in Europe, and in the past half a year it advanced for 25 positions.
New Webometrics rank according to Google Scholar Citations
Since 2015, ranking of institutions according to the number of citations in Google Scholar database was introduced into the Webometrics system. Today, it includes about a million higher education institutions, among which there are 5000 universities. In order for a university to enter into ranking, the employees of a university should open their Google Scholar profile with the official name of the university and their institutional e-mail address. The University of Osijek organized an activity supervised by the Centre for Quality Assurance, to assure that the university’s employees publish their papers in their Google Scholar profile. Therefore, we hope that the position of our University in the next report in July 2016 will be at an appropriate level.
Final thoughts
Additional efforts and activities of the University of Osijek constituents have resulted in significant improvement of the University of Osijek’s position on the global and European Webometrics ranking. In order to further increase the overall ranking of our University, it is necessary to work systematically on the increase of all factors that this index takes into account. The Presence factor can be increased with a systematic work on the branching of web sites of each University constituent, for example a compulsory web page for each course with sub-pages for course description, teaching materials, literature and other, which would significantly contribute to a better ranking in the Webometrics. The value of Openness factor can be increased, for example, by a systematic publication of teaching materials for each course, graduate theses and others in PDF, PPT, PPTX, doc, docx, rtf formats. Excellence factor measures the quality of scientific papers from a particular university. We welcome all the efforts of scientists from our University to publish their works in journals indexed in relevant databases. Given that the Impact factor is measured by the number of external links (links) to the university from websites of external institutions, our university can raise the value of this factor by referring all the participating institutions to set up links to our site, and by greater activity in the publication of the latest news related to the University to popular external portals and social networks.
Apart from that, we have already written about the need for a fair and equitable evaluation of the papers of so-called copyright groups that have a too big impact at the factor of Excellence. Meanwhile, The University of Osijek has further engaged the Center for improvement and quality assurance so that the results of positioning of the University of Osijek would be even better. We believe that for this purpose the people responsible for quality at every University constituent would need to add to their job description the initiation, as well as the systematic assurance of activities in every constituent unit needed to increase the Webometrics ranking.
All of this gives us confidence that the results of positioning of the University of Osijek will be even better.
