THE UNIVERSITY of Santo Tomas (UST) remained the fifth-best Philippine institution despite getting a lower ranking in the 2024 Webometrics of World Universities.
Previously at 2,523rd, UST dropped to 2,620th in the January 2024 edition of the Webometrics Ranking.
The 20-year-old Webometrics Rankings biannually assesses the volume and quality of over 32,000 global institutions’ research and academic materials published on the Internet.
The University of the Philippines Diliman was still the country’s top university (856th), followed by De La Salle University Manila (1,647th); University of the Philippines, which covers all UP constituent universities (1,914th) and Ateneo de Manila University (2,177th).
About 363 Philippine universities made it to this year’s ranking of world universities.
Higher education institutions are ranked based on the visibility or impact of their web content (50%), excellence or the number of most cited papers across all disciplines (40%) and openness or the number of researcher citations (10%).
UST performed best in openness or transparency (2,284th), an indicator that ranks a school according to the number of citations from its top 310 authors excluding the first 20 outliers. Only the citations from the main institutional web domains of universities were used in the assessment category.
The España-based university obtained 45,146 citations, the fourth-highest among 17 Philippine schools in terms of Google citations. It was behind University of the Philippines (360,101), De La Salle University Manila (126,736) and University of the Philippines Diliman (59,431).
The Philippine institutions behind UST in the transparency indicator were Ateneo de Manila University (28,572), Mindanao State University Iligan Institute of Technology (19,693) and Mapua Institute of Technology (12,124).
The University also ranked 3,859th and 3,214th in the impact and excellence categories, respectively.
This year’s edition drew its results from the institutions’ 2018-2022 data, according to the Webometrics website.
United States institutions Harvard University (1st), Stanford University (2nd) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (3rd) maintained their ranks as the top three universities in the world. F – with reports from Bianca Ysabel Abrencillo
