The oldest public university in Uganda which is also one of Africa’s oldest, Makerere University has been ranked 11th in Africa and the best university in Uganda in Webometrics’ latest rankings.
The Webometrics Ranking of World Universities is a ranking system for the world’s universities based on a composite indicator that takes into account both the volume of the Web contents and the visibility and impact of these web publications according to the number of external inlinks (site citations) they received.
The ranking is published by the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) located in Madrid.
Reacting to the latest rankings, the Vice Chancellor of Makerere University, Prof. Barnabas Nawangwe said he was happy many more Ugandan universities made it to the list of Africa’s top 1000.
“I am happy to see many more Ugandan universities ranked among the top 1000 in Africa via Webometrics. Congratulations!” Prof. Nawangwe said.
Makerere is followed by Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST) ranked the 35th in Africa and Kyambogo University which is ranked 185th.
Gulu University takes fourth place in Uganda having been ranked 189th in Africa followed by Kampala International University ranked 206th in Africa. Uganda Martyrs University Nkozi, 209th in Africa, takes the sixth place in Uganda.
Islamic University in Mbale ranked 246th in Africa is seventh best in Uganda as Uganda Christian University ( 260th in Africa) takes eighth place in Uganda.
A total of 32 Ugandan institutions of higher learning are listed among the best 1,000 in Africa. Webometrics is the largest academic ranking of Higher Education Institutions.
Since 2004 and every six months an independent, objective, free, open scientific exercise is performed by the Cybermetrics Lab (Spanish National Research Council, CSIC) for the providing reliable, multidimensional, updated and useful information about the performance of universities from all over the world based on their web presence and impact.
According to the Webometrics, the ranking seeks “to promote academic web presence, supporting the Open Access initiatives for increasing significantly the transfer of scientific and cultural knowledge generated by the universities to the whole society”.
“In order to achieve this objective, the publication of rankings is one of the most powerful and successful tools for starting and consolidating the processes of change in the academia, increasing the scholars’ commitment and setting up badly needed long term strategies,” it adds.
Webometrics says the methodology is based on several indicators including presence which refers to the size (number of webpages) of the main webdomain of the institution. This also includes subdomains sharing the same (central or main) webdomain and all the file types including rich files like pdf documents
The other indicator is the visibility of a university which is the number of external networks (subnets) originating backlinks to the institution’s webpages. After normalization, the average value between the two sources is selected
The ranking also considered the number of citations from Top authors according to the source as well as the number of papers amongst the top 10% most cited in 26 disciplines based on data for the five year period (2012 to 2016).