WEBOMETRICS by UNIRANKS

WEBOMETRICS evaluates universities through three dimensions:

Impact — 50%
Openness — 10%
Excellence — 40%

The methodology combines web visibility intelligence from UNIRANKS Web Growth Intelligence (GI) with academic and research intelligence from the UNIRANKS Open Index (OI).

Impact — 50%

Impact measures the strength, diversity and authority of the external web ecosystem connected to the university’s official domain and relevant institutional subdomains.

Components

35% — Referring IP Subnets
25% — Referring Main Domains
20% — Referring Domain Authority
10% — Link Quality
10% — Link Diversity

Referring subnets measure the diversity of independent network environments.
Referring main domains reduce the effect of repeated links from the same website.
Domain authority evaluates the strength of referring sources.
Link quality reduces the effect of suspicious or low-quality backlink environments.
Link diversity considers distribution across networks, domains, geographic environments and domain types.

UNIRANKS Web Growth Intelligence (GI) collects, integrates, validates and analyzes web visibility intelligence from multiple data sources using UNIRANKS processing and quality-control systems.

Openness — 10%

Openness measures the scholarly visibility and citation influence of the university’s academic community using UNIRANKS Open Index (OI).

Method

Identify academics associated with the institution.
Rank academics by citation performance.
Select the top 320 academics.
Exclude the top 20 highest-cited academics.
Calculate citation performance using the remaining cohort.

Excluding the top 20 highest-cited academics reduces distortion from extreme citation outliers and provides a broader measure of institutional scholarly visibility.

Excellence — 40%

Excellence measures the institution’s high-impact research performance using UNIRANKS Open Index (OI).

26 academic fields
a 7-year observation window
the most recent 2 years are excluded
the institution’s strongest cited research works are evaluated within each field

The latest two years are excluded because recent publications have not had enough time to accumulate citations fairly. Field-based evaluation is necessary because citation behavior differs substantially across disciplines.

Overall Score

WEBOMETRICS Score = Impact × 50% + Openness × 10% + Excellence × 40%

Indicator values are normalized before aggregation to support fairer comparison between institutions of different sizes and profiles.

Data Intelligence Systems

UNIRANKS Web Growth Intelligence (GI)

Used for web visibility and Impact analysis, including:

referring domains
referring main domains
IP networks and subnets
authority signals
link quality
link diversity

UNIRANKS Open Index (OI)

Used for Openness and Excellence, including:

academics
affiliations
research works
citations
research fields
scholarly influence
institutional research performance

Data Integrity

WEBOMETRICS applies automated and analytical controls to identify:

abnormal backlink concentrations
duplicated network signals
suspicious linking environments
extreme citation outliers
incorrect institutional affiliations
duplicate research records
incomplete or inconsistent institutional domains

Ranking Philosophy

Impact measures how widely the institution is referenced across the web. Openness measures the scholarly visibility of its academic community. Excellence measures the influence of its strongest research. Together, these dimensions provide a broader picture of institutional digital and scholarly impact.