All 26 universities in South Africa listed in new global ranking

A new global ranking of universities, using open data, has ranked all of South Africa’s universities based on the quality, quantity, and access to their web content.

The “Webometrics Ranking of World Universities” is an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain.

The research group’s ranking has a special focus on open access to data from global universities and lists institutions based on the quantity and quality of their web content.

The group stresses that the ranking has nothing to do with university websites – ie, the popularity, design or accessibility – but rather link analysis, which includes bibliographic citations – used by other university rankings – and also third-party involvement with university activities.

“Research output is also a key topic for webometrics, including not only formal – e-journals, repositories – publications but also informal scholarly communication.

“Web publication is cheaper, maintaining the high standards of quality of peer review processes. It could also reach much larger potential audiences, offering access to scientific knowledge to researchers and institutions located in developing countries and also to third parties (economic, industrial, political or cultural stakeholders) in their local community,” the group said.

Using webometrics, the group focused the 2022 ranking on three main indicators:

• Visibility: The number of external networks (subnets) linking to the institution’s web pages (50%)
• Transparency or Openness: The number of citations from the Top 210 authors, excluding the top 20 outliers (10%)
• Excellence: The number of papers amongst the top 10% most cited in each one of all 27 disciplines of the full database over the last five years (40%)

Because the ranking pulls its bibliographic data from many of the same sources, the list of top institutions closely follows that of other rankings. However, the Cybermetrics Lab says its ranking differentiates itself by excluding “subjective” indicators like feedback from surveys and unreliable reporting from the universities themselves.

The caveats to its data include bad naming practices by universities and sharing top-level domains – or changing these domains frequently – which can penalise their performance in the ranking.

Because of the web-based nature of the data collected, the Webometrics ranking also covers a staggering number of higher learning institutions – over 31,000 – including many of the smaller colleges and institutes often left out of other global rankings.

However, because all these institutions are ranked together, no distinction is explicitly made, so colleges, universities and theological seminaries are all listed together.

For South Africa, 120 higher learning institutes were ranked, falling between 245th and 29,356th in the world. South Africa has 26 public universities, including 12 traditional universities, 6 comprehensive universities, and 8 universities of technology. All universities feature in the rankings.

The University of Cape Town was the top-ranked university in the country, following the same trend seen in other university rankings.

UCT is followed by the University of the Witwatersrand, Stellenbosch University and the University of Pretoria. These were the only universities ranked within the top 500, globally.

Within the top 1000, the University of KwaZulu Nata, the University Johannesburg, Unisa and the University of the Western Cape follow.

The full ranking of South African universities is below:

Global Universities

The ranking of global universities aligns closely with other global rankings, with Harvard University in the US, taking top honours.

This is followed by Standford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Oxford in the UK.

The top 10 is dominated by US institutes, with the University of Cambridge falling just outside the top 10 at 11th.

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