UPD leads Philippine universities in int'l web rankings

MANILA, Philippines - The University of the Philippines Diliman (UPD) led universities in the country in the global ranking of universities' web presence, impact, openness and excellence, the Spanish National Research Council’s Webometrics Ranking of World Universities 2014 reported.

UPD ranked 1604 in the world out of over 22,000 higher educational institutions included in the list. The rankings are based on publicly available web data on various universities, and uses link analysis for quality evaluation "as it is a far more powerful tool than citation analysis or global surveys," the council's Cybermetrics Lab said.

UPD is followed by De La Salle University Manila, UP Los Baños, UP Manila, Ateneo de Manila University, University of Santo Tomas, UP (system), UP Mindanao, Aquinas University and University of San Carlos.

National Taiwan University ranked 1st place among Asian universities while UPD ranked 479th.

A composite indicator consisting of university visibility (50 percent) and activity (50 percent) determines a school's position in the ranking. Visibility is measured through impact by counting all the external inlinks that the university webdomain receives from third parties. Activity, on the other hand, is measured by presence (total number of webpages hosted in the main webdomain), openness (number of rich files (pdf, doc, docx, ppt) published in dedicated websites according to the academic search engine Google Scholar) and excellence (academic papers published in high impact international journals).

"The objective is not to evaluate websites, their design or usability or the popularity of their contents according to the number of visits or visitors. Web indicators are considered as proxies in the correct, comprehensive, deep evaluation of the university global performance, taking into account its activities and outputs and their relevance and impact,” the council behind Webometrics Rankings said.