PETALING JAYA: Three Malaysian universities have made it to the top 500 out of 12,000 universities ranked in the Webometrics Ranking Web of World Universities released Saturday.
They are Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (419), Universiti Sains Malaysia (428) and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (462).
This is the first time that Malaysian varsities have entered into the top 500 since the ranking's inception in 2004.
Meanwhile, American universities dominate the Webometrics ranking, with the top five universities being the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Stanford University, Cornell University, and the University of California, Berkeley respectively.
The ranking is an initiative by the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group part of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientficas (CSIC) in Spain.
According to the Webometrics website, the aim of the rankings is to encourage universities to have a better web presence and researchers to publish more scientific content on the internet.
Among the main indicators used to analyse university web presence are the size or number of web pages recovered from search engines; visibility; number of rich files available; and the number of citations found in Google Scholar.
The rankings are published every six months, and survey around 20,000 higher education institutions worldwide.
Ref: http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2011/7/30/nation/20110730194506&sec=nation
