Webometrics ranks UJ first in Jordan, among top 8% worldwide

AMMAN — The University of Jordan (UJ) ranked first in Jordan, and 10th in the Arab world out of 1,216 Arab universities, according to the January 2021 edition of the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities.

Director of the Accreditation and Quality Assurance Centre Menwer Attarakih said that UJ ranked among the top 8 per cent of higher education institutions at the global level, holding a place among the top 1,000 for the first time with a ranking of 887, according to a UJ statement.

Attarakih said that the Webometrics ranking aims to promote open access to the knowledge produced by a university, focusing on the quality and quantity of its web contents.

He added that the ranking used in this edition is a combination of three sub-indicators: Web content and impact (50 per cent) which measures the number of external networks linked to the university’s webpages, transparency or openness (10 per cent) which is measured by the number of citations from top 210 authors, and excellence (40 per cent) measured by the number of papers amongst the top 10 per cent most cited in each one of the all 27 disciplines of the full database, said the statement.

According to the ranking’s webpage, Webometrics — also called Ranking Web — is not a ranking of the websites of universities, but it is a ranking of universities. It uses both webometric (all missions) and bibliometric (research mission) indicators.

The ranking 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, concluded the statement.