VSU improves from 27th to 19th spot in PH Webometrics ranking for July 2021

After two assessments that saw a decline in VSU’s Webometrics performance, the university has climbed up again and returned to the Top 20 web ranking of Philippine universities.

VSU was up by eight notches in the July 2021 assessment from 27th to 19th spot—just one step close to its highest Webometrics ranking in January 2020.

This makes VSU the only university in Eastern Visayas to have reached the top 20 spot since Webometrics started releasing their independent ranking assessment in 2004.

The Webometrics Ranking of World Universities is mainly conducted by Cybermatics Lab, a research group of Spanish National Research Council or Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC). This is the largest public research body in Spain.

Cumulative rankings are based on three different rankings namely impact rank, openness rank, and excellence rank. Each of these ranks were outsourced through different platforms.

The impact rank is determined through a university’s visibility in terms of web content, measured by access links to the institution’s webpages. This measure is outsourced from Ahrefs Majestic constituting 50% of the total score.

Meanwhile, the openness rank is factored by top cited researchers, where it is counted through the number of citations based on Google Scholar profiles constituting 10% of the overall tally.

And lastly, the excellence rank is determined by taking into account the top 10% most cited papers in all the 27 disciplines collated by Scimago for a five year period (2015 to 2019). This weighs about 40% in the overall Webometrics ranking.

Among these three measures, VSU performs best in the openness rank with a worldwide ranking of 4,366 followed by excellence rank at 6,650 and impact rank of 12,810.

Taken collectively, VSU is quite doing well in terms of top cited researchers and top cited papers with more work needed in terms of web content impact.

Mr. Jed Asaph D. Cortes, Head of the VSU Web Team, sees this as a challenge to improve by widening VSU’s web presence.

“We’re working hard to continually add to and maintain quality content at the VSU website, but we also need to have our partners link to us to improve our impact ranking. We are optimistic that we will accomplish that and come out better in the next results,” he said.

Webometric Rankings aim to promote web publication, supporting open access initiatives, and digital access to scientific publications and to other academic materials.

They boast of having a larger coverage compared to other similar rankings, being that they are not only focused on research results but also on other indicators that could reflect better qualities of global scholars and research institutions worldwide.

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