TEHRAN - The July edition of Webometrics Ranking of World Universities has placed 462 Iranian higher education centers among the world’s top institutions.

Since 2004, the Ranking Web (or Webometrics Ranking) is published twice a year (data is collected during the first weeks of January and July for being public at the end of both months), covering more than 31,000 Higher Education Institutions worldwide. 

The original aim of the Ranking is 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.

The ranking is based on the three indices of Visibility (number of external networks linking to the institution's webpages), Transparency (number of citations from top 210 authors), and Excellence (number of papers amongst the top 10% most cited in each one of all 27 disciplines of the full database).

The University of Tehran tops the list of Iranian universities included in this ranking (295), followed by Tehran University of Medical Sciences (475), Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences (648), Sharif University of Technology (660), Amirkabir University of Technology (759), Tarbiat Modares University (795), Tabriz University of Medical Sciences (864), Iran University of Science and Technology (909), Isfahan University of Medical Sciences (931), Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (935), and Mashhad University of Medical Sciences (960).

Harvard University, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Oxford, and the University of California Berkeley are the top five universities worldwide in Webometrics.

Scientific growth

A review of Scopus global ranking in terms of the normalized citation index over the past 10 years shows that Iran has moved up to 16th place in 2020 from 22nd in 2011.

The ranking is based on the three indices of Visibility, Transparency, and Excellence.

Studies show that in 2021, the number of Iranian scientific articles indexed by the Scopus International Citation Database has reached 77,351. This figure was equal to 71,971 in 2020 and 64,988 in 2019.

The 2021 data have not been yet completed and the mentioned figure will increase again. While scientific articles and the latest research findings of Iranian researchers in 2019 received about 0.08 percent more than the international average citation, in 2020, it has increased to 14 percent.

Therefore, research made by Iranians conducted in 2020 has become more qualitative. Also, research activities resulting from Iran's international participation in science production were about 27.4 percent in 2019, which has increased to 30.7 percent in 2020. 

The share of Iranian articles in the top 1 percent of the world highly cited was 1.2 percent in 2019, which reached 1.3 percent in 2020. This group of articles has the highest number of citations in the world of science.

MG