VSU keeps Top 10 spot in Webometrics Ranking of Philippine HEIs

VSU continues to be among the Top 10 best-performing academic institutions in the country that facilitates open access to knowledge sharing according to the latest edition of the Webometrics Ranking of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in the Philippines.

Despite keeping its Top 10 spot twice in a row, the university’s worldwide rank has elevated from 4,220th in July 2023 to 4,199th; meanwhile, its standing in Southeast Asia is now already at 175th.

This rank indicates that the university was able to maintain its research excellence by promoting scientific knowledge and technology transfer to the communities in Eastern Visayas and beyond.

The objective of the Webometrics Ranking is not dependent on the popularity of the contents of the HEIs’ websites, but rather on the academic web presence that showcases how each university has performed in terms of their web content impact (Visibility/Impact-50%), top cited researchers from Google Scholar profiles (Openness/Transparency-10%), and top cited papers from 2018 to 2022 (Excellence/Scholar-40%).

From these three indicators, VSU significantly improved in the Impact Rank and Excellence Rank. For the Impact Rank, VSU scored 6232 which is way higher than the previous 6528 rating in the last edition. Meanwhile, on the Excellence Rank, the university climbed from 4,764 to 4,755 mark, respectively.

However, there was a big drop in VSU’s Openness Rank this year because it obtained a 4,462 score from 4,167 percentage points in the previous release.

After looking at this case, the University Integrated Media Center (UIMC) Head Dr. Ulderico B. Alviola planned to propose a workshop for all researchers in the university to help them build their Google Scholar profiles which still need to be reflected in the said database.

“We will soon be working with the Office of the Vice President for Research, Extension and Innovation (OVPREI) to hold a workshop with our faculty and researchers on this area. We will also be closely monitoring all our Scopus-indexed publications to properly tag them all and connect them to our institutional database because I think many of our scientific papers in the past have not been credited to VSU,” Dr. Alviola explained.

The University of the Philippines (UP) continues to dominate the Webometrics Ranking with three of its constituent campuses making it to the Top 10 Circle again, namely UP Diliman (1st), UP (3rd), and UP Manila (7th). 

De La Salle University in Manila (2nd), Ateneo de Manila University (4th), and the University of Santos Tomas (5th) remained with their respective standings from the last edition.  

In Eastern Visayas, two institutions also improved their national rankings, with Samar State University climbing up the ladder from 50th to 36th place, and Leyte Normal University moving from 70th to 69th, respectively.

The Webometrics Ranking uses both webometrics (all missions) and bibliometrics (research missions) indicators to evaluate 31,000 universities and colleges across the world. This is an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, the largest public research body in Spain.

VSU OIC President Dr. Daniel Leslie S. Tan congratulates the Viscan community for this ranking and hopes to improve VSU’s standing in the next edition.

“I’m happy that we retained our position within the Top 10 circle. We need to be continuously aggressive in this area because Webometrics is the only ranking system that takes into account the web of influence along with research productivity. This is vital because it allows us to understand how we are affecting our online communities who continue to subscribe to the content we produce about VSU,” Dr. Tan said.

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