Web Rankings of World Universities - The "Webometrics Ranking of World Universities" is an initiative of theCybermetrics Lab, a research group affiliated with the Ministry of Education in Spain. The Lab is devoted to the quantitative analysis of the Internet and web content,especially those related to the scholarly communication of scientific knowledge. The world's universities are ranked twice a year by the Cybermetrics Lab.

According to its July 2011 ranking of 14,876institutions, the six best universities in the world, in decreasing order of ranking, areMassachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Stanford University, Cornell University, University of California- Berkeley, and the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Each of theseinstitutions is located in the United States, as are all the other institutions in the top 23positions, with the exception of Cambridge University in the UK (#16).

One of the problems with the ranking of universities is the subjective nature of some of the metrics that are used. For instance, some rankings are made based on what the alumni say about their alma maters or on the university's popularity, as measured by the number of applicants or the proportion of accepted students that ultimately enroll. In some rankings, a school can lose a few notches if it happens to be situated in a remote location, independent of the quality of the academic programs. Yet prospective students and their parents rely heavily on these ratings to guide them in their decision on where to make one of the most important investments of their lives. So we have to be careful about how we interpret these ratings.The Cybermetrics Labrankingappears to be quite objective, having been rooted in quantitative analysis.

What actually is ranked?

The four quantitative metrics used for ranking by the Cybermetrics Lab are itemized below:

Size: Number of web pages recovered from four engines: Google, Yahoo, Live Search, and Exalead.

Visibility: The total number of unique external links received (inlinks) by a site, as obtained from Yahoo Search, Live Search and Exalead.

Rich Files: File formats of the types Adobe Acrobat, Adobe PostScript, Microsoft Word,and Microsoft PowerPoint were extracted from sites using Google, Yahoo Search, Live Search and Exalead.

Scholarship: This is the number of papers, reports and citations, as reported by Google Scholar.

Note that the web has been considered an adequate platform for the internationalization of the institutions. A strong and detailed web presence providing exact descriptions of the structure and activities of the university can attract new students and scholars worldwide. The external inlinks received by a domain are assumed to measure the visibility and the impact of the published material. Also, asignificant fraction of the motivation for linking has been assumed to work in a similar way as bibliographic citation.

A few remarks on the ranking

One striking observation is that 39 of the top 50 universities in the world are located in the United States.The report shows that, of the 191 countries included in the ranking, the United States leads the pack, followed by Germany, UK, Canada, and Spain in that order. Israel is ranked 18; China, 23; Russia, 34; South Africa, 41; and India, 44.

The Nigerian Scenario

I have generated the following table from the published results of the ranking. It clearly shows that Nigeria has relatively substandard universities in the attributes that were investigated. The implications are many, including the quality of our students and their ability to compete globally. Unfortunately, other studies have also ranked Nigerian universities very poorly.

NIGERIA UNIVERSITY AFRICA RANK WORLD RANK

RANK

1 University of Ibadan 41 3,499

2 University of Ilorin 42 3,753

3 AhmaduBello University 43 3,806

4 Obafemi Awolowo University 44 3,879

5 University of Lagos 46 3,942

6 University of Benin 55 4,554

7 University of Agriculture Abeokuta 60 4,833

8 University of Jos 67 5,376

9 University of Nigeria Nsukka 68 5,396

10 Covenant University 93 7,169

How do we solve this problem? The report provides a list of recommendations.For example, it suggests that websites should accurately represent the resources, activities, and global performance of an institution in a manner that provides visitors with a clear vision of the institution. Specific recommendations pertain to the name of your URL, content creationand digitization of data, interlinking issues, and the type of rich and media file formats.

While the recommendations are relevant to Nigerian institutions and should be taken very seriously, the relative dearth of scholarly activities in Nigerian universities might as well be the dark horse of the bunch of issues. How many external resources of international interest, such as conference websites, software repositories, scientific societies and their publications, especially electronic journals, are hosted by Nigerian universities? The answer is: very few.The low research productivity of Nigerian institutions, which can easily be traced to the abysmally low research funding in Nigeria, is to blame.

Similar sentiments were expressed at the recent conference of vice chancellors and deans of schools of science and technology (COVIDSET) in Johannesburg, South Africa, in which I participated. The government of Nigeria should emulate South Africa by coming up with a workable mechanism to award significant research grants to both public and privateuniversities in Nigeria. Presently, the percentage of the Nigerian national budget that is devoted to academic research is essentially zero when compared with the more developed countries of the world. It would be hard for Nigeria universities to move up in the ranking if this situation persists. Buried somewhere within the Nigerian problems is of course the issue of electricity and general infrastructure.

Daily Trust/03/01/2012