Thursday, August 27, 2009

Revolutionary Road

Many of our readers believe that our objectives are to promote Open Access and to rank Universities according to their web presence. However, the reality is slightly different as there is only one objective: Reinforce electronic publication through ranking institutions.

As probably you already know, the bibliometric evaluation procedures are in fact responsible of the explosive growth of academic publications. If "Publish or Perish" is the current motto of scholars, our efforts are intended to change it to "Web Publish or Perish" in a nearby future.

This aim should be taken into account for understanding the recent changes in the ranking methodology. In the last year we published the web indicators as ordinals because ranks have far more impact than percentages. Contrary to other ranking editors, our composite indicator combined ranks not values, clearly favouring top universities (second is twice first, even if there is little percentage difference between them).

Now we decided to have the best of both worlds: The WR indicator is calculated with the normalized values (without changes in the weighting), but we publish the individual indicators (size, visibility, rich files and Scholar) as ranks, as in previous editions.

Do not forget to read our new FAQ!.

1 Comments:

At 5:18 pm, Anonymous MBA UK said...

Thank you for sharing, it is such a nice article,

 

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