UP, DLSU, AdMU among top 100 universities in SE Asia

The University of the Philippines (UP), De La Salle University (DLSU) and Ateneo de Manila University (AdMU) were among Southeast Asia’s best universities in terms of the quality of their presence on the Internet, according to the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities of the Cybermetrics Lab based in Madrid, Spain. UP Diliman, DLSU Manila, and AdMU were 23rd, 77th, and 91st, respectively, in the roster of top 100 universities in Southeast Asia. Cybermetrics updated and posted the second edition of the ranking Saturday. UP Diliman was rated 918th in the world, out of 12,000 universities evaluated. DLSU’s world ranking was 2,096th while Ateneo was at 2,525th. Cybermetrics released the first edition of the ranking last January. Since then, UP Diliman rose 58 rungs from 976th. DLSU Manila slipped from 1,686th while Ateneo slid from 2,339th. In the updated ranking, Cybermetrics said the National University of Singapore topped in Southeast Asia while Malaysia’s Kasetsart University and Chulalongkorn University were 2nd and 3rd. The ranking has the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the world’s best on the web, followed by Harvard University, Stanford University, Cornell University, and University of California Berkeley. The study covered over 19,000 universities. Cybermetrics rated these institutions in terms of “web visibility" and volume of “rich files" as well as number of scholarly papers and citations, and of pages recovered from Google, Yahoo, Live Search and Exalead. Cybermetrics designed the ranking to promote web publication, support Open Access initiatives, and encourage electronic access to scientific publications and to other academic material. The research laboratory defined “web visibility" as the “total number of unique external links received by a site can be only confidently obtained from Yahoo Search. This factor represents 50 percent of the rating. “Rich files" are files relevant to the universities’ academic and publication activities which are posted in Adobe Acrobat, Adobe PostScript, Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint formats. The number of pages recovered from the search engines make up the “size" of the universities’ presence on the web. The “scholar scores" are from the Google Scholar database, which “provides the number of papers and citations for each academic domain." The laboratory is located at the Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales. It is part of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), “the largest public research body in Spain." Cybermetrics said on its website that it is “devoted to the quantitative analysis of the Internet and Web contents specially those related to the processes of generation and scholarly communication of scientific knowledge." — ELR, GMA News