Top Ranking System

University Ranking Methodologies

Webometrics
According to webometrics university activity is multi-dimensional and this is reflected in its web presence. So the best way to build the ranking is by combining a group of indicators that measure these different aspects. The webometrics four indicators that are used to rank universities were obtained from the quantitative results provided by the main search engines as follows:
Size (S). Number of pages recovered from four engines: Google, Yahoo, Live Search and Exalead. For each engine, results are log-normalised to 1 for the highest value. Then for each domain, maximum and minimum results are excluded and every institution is assigned a rank according to the combined sum.


Visibility (V). The total number of unique external links received (inlinks) by a site can be only confidently obtained from Yahoo Search.
Rich Files (R). After evaluation of their relevance to academic and publication activities and considering the volume of the different file formats. These data were extracted using Google.
Scholar (Sc). Google Scholar provides the number of papers and citations for each academic domain. These results from the Scholar database represent papers, reports and other academic items.

Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU)

ARWU considers every university that has any Nobel Laureates, Fields Medalists, Highly Cited Researchers, or papers published in Nature or Science. In addition, universities with significant amount of papers indexed by Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCIE) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) are also included.
Universities are ranked by several indicators of academic or research performance, including alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, highly cited researchers, papers published in Nature and Science, papers indexed in major citation indices, and the per capita academic performance of an institution. The indicators are as follows
Quality of Education The total number of the alumni of an institution winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals.
Quality of Faculty The total number of the staff of an institution winning Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Medicine and Economics and Fields Medal in Mathematics . The number of highly cited researchers in 21 subject categories are also considered.
Research Output The number of papers published in Nature and Science between 2004 and 2008 and the total number of papers indexed in Science Citation Index-Expanded and Social Science Citation Index in 2008. Only publications of 'Article' and 'Proceedings Paper' types are considered.
Per Capita Performance The weighted scores of the above five indicators divided by the number of full-time equivalent academic staff. If the number of academic staff for institutions of a country cannot be obtained, the weighted scores of the above five indicators is used.

   

4 International Colleges and Universities (4ICU)

Universities and Colleges are sorted by 4icu.org Web Popularity Ranking. The ranking is based upon an algorithm including three unbiased and independent web metrics extracted from three different search engines:
• - Google Page Rank
• - Yahoo Inbound Links
• - Alexa Traffic Rank

The aim of 4ICU rankings is to provide an approximate popularity ranking of worldwide Universities and Colleges based upon the popularity of their websites. This can especially help international students to understand how popular a specific University/College is in a foreign country.

QS World University Rankings

The QS World University Rankings were conceived to present a multi-faceted view of the relative strengths of the world's leading universities. The overall rankings are compiled based in six distinct indicators:
Academic Peer Review The Academic Peer Review is based on an online survey distributed to academics worldwide. Respondents are not permitted to submit their own institution or to respond more than once (their latest response is counted). Weightings are applied both geographically and by discipline to ensure as fair a representative spread as possible.

Employer Review Similar to the Academic Peer Review, this indicator is based on a global online survey, this time distributed to employers. Geographical weightings are again applied to ensure fair representation from key regions of the world.
Faculty Student Ratio Faculty Student Ratio is used in many ranking systems and evaluations in the world, and whilst it may not be a perfect measure of teaching quality, it is the most globally available and accessible measure of commitment to teaching. An indication that the institution in question has sufficient staff to teach its students.
Citations per Faculty Citations are a widely used, conventional measure of research strength. A citation is a reference to one academic publication in the text of another. The more citations a publication receives the better it is perceived to be, the more highly cited papers a university publishes, the stronger it can be considered to be. As a measure this is somewhat geared towards scientific and technical subjects, which is why it doesn't carry more weight. The source used in this evaluation is Scopus, the world's largest abstract and citation database of research literature.
International Factors In today's increasingly globalized world, the most successful universities have to attract the world's bet students and faculty. Simple evaluations of the proportion of international students and international faculty serve as indicators of an institution's international attractiveness.

Eduroute

Eduroute focuses on studying and evaluating university websites and not the performance of a university. The indicators that are used in ranking the universities are as follows
Volume This indicator measures the volume of information published on the website of a university. It is also an indicator of the degree of interaction between the website and its users whether they are students or university professors. This in turn reflects the amount of support and investment the university has put into providing as much information as possible about the university on its website.
Online scientific information University publications and their number are one of the major and most important things that have to be taken into consideration when ranking a university. This is an especially important aspect of ranking since it attracts researchers and scholars looking for researches to the website of a certain university
Links quantity Website links are one of the main factors which determine the success of any website and the degree of its interaction with other related and good websites. Here Eduroute measures the number of incoming links whether these links are from academic or nonacademic websites.
Quality of links and content This ranking factor mainly measures the quality of links and factors. Sometimes some of the university's provide lots of content and links on their website without taking into consideration the quality of those links and the content published on the website. Some universities also resort to buying links without taking into consideration whether or not these links link to other related and renowned websites. Therefore it was of great importance to measure this aspect of any website in order to reflect the true size of a university's website on the internet and to measure the degree in which the university is concerned with the quality of content it provides on its website.

Criticisms and drawbacks of the rankings

ARWU – As with all rankings, there are issues of methodology, and one of the primary criticisms of the ranking is its bias towards the natural sciences, over other subjects and English language science journals. This is evidenced by the inclusion of criteria such as the volume of articles published by Science or Nature (both Journals devoted to the natural sciences published in English), or the number of Nobel Prize winners (which are predominantly awarded to the physical sciences) and Fields Medalists (mathematics). Furthermore, the ranking does not take into the account whether those winners are still associated with the institutes nor consider where the award winning works were performed. As a result, it creates a superficial phantom award counting game in favor of older and more established institutes even though these institutes may not have active winners in their faculty rosters, or the rich American institutes that attract prize winners with big financial reward even though no award winning work was done there. Counting the number of articles in Nature and Science Journals as one of the major criteria in ranking institutes appears highly superficial because many award winning works were not published in these journals.
QS World University Rankings – Since the rankings are primarily based on Academic Peer Review and Employer Review respectively any unfavorable image developed by a group of universities, associated by country, tends to harm their collective rankings. For this reason, universities worldwide should seriously consider adhering to internationally accepted standards so that they don’t not run the risk of sliding in the ranks on the international front.
Webometrics – Webometric indicators are provided to show the commitment of the institutions to Web publication. Thus, Universities of high academic quality may be ranked lower than expected due to a restrained web publication policy.

4ICU- The methodology used in this site ranks colleges and universities based on their websites' popularity and usage; it does not measure the schools or their programs by quality of education or services. .