..on the web! The new listing by Webometrics ranks the universities based on how well they are publicized and visible on the internet.
We reported from the Times Higher Education list in an earlier brief - Lund University 67th among world's top 200 - where Lund University scored high in the world. A new listing by Webometrics ranks the universities based on how well they are publicized and visible on the internet.
Here, Norway’s Trondheim is the best university in Scandinavia, and places 16th among the best universities in Europe when it comes to visibility and presence on the internet. Not surprisingly, when it comes to world rankings the American universities clearly dominate among the top 100 (World Rank). The top European university is ETH (The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in Zurich, Switzerland, followed by the universities in Cambridge and Oxford, England. The next to best university in Scandinavia is the one in Helsinki (on 23rd place), followed by Oslo University (32nd place). Sweden’s best university is the Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan in Stockholm (Royal Institute of Technology), which ranks 40th in Europe and fourth in Scandinavia.
The ranking was done by Spanish Webometrics, which covered mainly four indicators; size on the web, visibility (amount of external links to URL), rich files, and scholar (scholarly items published between 2006 and 2010). External links to the own URL was given the highest weight in the ranking which was created by using the quantitative results provided by the main search engines.
Webometrics considers a university's presence and visibility on the internet a good indicator of its academic proficiency. The original aim of the Ranking was to promote Web publication. Read more here: Objectives of the Webometrics Ranking of World's Universities
Somehow, the words popularized by author Mark Twain come to mind, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." (Twain attributed the quote to the 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli)
Also on statistics, and - while we always thought the Scandinavian cartoonist Strøyer coined this - already Andrew Lang (1844-1912) said "An unsophisticated forecaster uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts - for support rather than for illumination."
