THE UNIVERSITY of Santo Tomas slipped one spot to fifth-best school in the Philippines and dropped globally to 2,406th at the latest Webometrics Ranking of World Universities.
In the 22nd edition of the assessment, the España campus’ web performance dropped by 27 notches overall from 2,379th place in July last year.
The University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman gained the top spot among various higher education institutions in the country, with a worldwide ranking of 938th from last edition’s 1,827th. De La Salle University, which topped the Philippine schools previously, slipped to second after placing 1,514th globally from 1,521st. It was followed by UP (1,829th) and Ateneo De Manila University (2,055th). UST was followed by Mapua Institute of Technology, which dropped to 3,215th from 3,207th.
Webometrics editor Isidro Aguillo said an institution’s web presence must accurately reflect its activities to earn a “reliable ranking.”
“In the second decade of the 21st century, the web is central to the future of all university missions, as it is already the most important scholarly communication tool, the future platform for off-campus distance learning, the open forum for community engagement, and the universal showcase for attracting talent, funding, and resources,” he said.
Three indicators were used to evaluate more than 32,000 higher education institutions from over 200 countries: visibility or the number of external networks linking to the school’s webpages (50%); transparency or openness, which refers to the number of citations from top 310 authors (10%); and excellence or number of papers among the top 10% most cited in each one of 27 disciplines from 2019 to 2023 (40%).
The University received a total of 56,533 citations. It was below the citation count of UP (429,590), De La Salle University (155,184) and UP Diliman (70,012). Ateneo De Manila University and Mindanao University Iligan Institute of Technology earned 36,942 and 27,698 citations, respectively.
Harvard University, Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all from the United States, were still the top three global schools with the best web visibility.
The Webometrics used webometric (all missions) and bibliometric (research mission) indicators to “assess the university’s global performance comprehensively, considering its activities, outputs, relevance and impact.” Web data was collected during the first days of January, while bibliometric analysis was conducted from 2019 to 2023.
According to Aguillo, having two or more web domains penalizes an institution’s ranking and visibility, especially if they are no longer in use, as it may confuse global audiences and third parties.
Launched in 2004, the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities measures different schools of higher learning every six months to promote open-access publication of scientific studies. F
