VSU retains its Top 8 spot in Webometrics Ranking of Philippine Universities

VSU remains to be the Top 8 university in the country according to the January 2023 edition of the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities. Globally, VSU climbed 15 spots higher from 4,128th place in July 2022 to 4,113th rank in the most recent evaluation.

This semi-annual global ranking system is developed by Cybermetrics Lab, an independent research group belonging to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), which is the largest public research body in Spain.

The Webometrics Ranking is the largest academic ranking of universities and colleges all over the world that evaluated over 31,000 Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) from more than 200 countries in North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Arab World, and Oceania.

Editors of this ranking system are scientists working at one world-class public research institution with long experience in metrics-guided evaluation. Released every six months, Webometrics is an independent, objective, free, open scientific exercise for providing reliable, multidimensional, updated, and useful information about the performance of universities from all over the world.

To rank universities, Webometrics uses three indicators namely: (1) Impact Rank, which constitutes 50% of the criteria and is about the visibility and content impacts of the university specifically measured by the number of external networks (subnets) linking to the institution's web pages collated through Ahrefs Majestic; (2) Openness Rank, which accounts for 10% of the criteria and is about the number of citations from Top 310 authors obtained through Google Scholar profiles; and (3) Excellence Rank, which constitutes the remaining 40% of the criteria obtained from Scimago that measures the number of papers amongst the top 10% most cited in each one of all 27 disciplines for a five-year period covering years 2017 to 2021.

For this particular evaluation, the Philippine universities included in the Magic 10 in the July 2022 edition have not moved their positions in the January 2023 results. However, it can be noted that VSU improved significantly in two indicators namely the Openness Rank from its previous global rank of 4,4780th place up to the 4,091st spot, and the Excellence Rank from 4,816th global rank climbing to 4,785th place. The current release also showed that VSU slid in the Impact Rank indicator from its previous 5,406th spot down to 5,811th place.

Only two institutions in the Visayas region made it to the Magic 10 including the University of San Carlos at the 5th spot while 3 universities in Mindanao made it to the cut and 5 from Luzon.

In Eastern Visayas, only three other universities made it to the Top 100 cut with Samar State University at 53rd place, Leyte Normal University at 70th spot, and Eastern Visayas State University at rank 74th.

In the Philippines, the country’s big 4 still dominate this ranking system led by the University of the Philippines Diliman followed by the De La Salle University Manila, then Ateneo de Manila University, and the University of Santo Tomas.

Globally, US-based institutions snatched the Top 4 most coveted spots with Harvard University as number 1 followed by Stanford University, then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California Berkeley.

VSU President Edgardo E. Tulin is delighted to receive the news that VSU continues to soar higher in different global ranking systems administered by independent international organizations.

“This is another great news for all of us #ProudViscans. It’s humbling that we get to be recognized now as one of the top 10 academic institutions in the country and we hope that we can further increase this ranking in the coming years. I thank the University Integrated Media Center (UIMC) for working hard in monitoring and improving our ranking, especially in the visibility of our web content. I’m equally grateful to our dedicated researchers who publish their work in internationally-indexed journals because we would not have reached the top if you are not prolific enough to submit your research work for peer-reviewed publications,” Dr. Tulin expressed.

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