The
"Webometrics Ranking of World Universities" 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.
CSIC
is among the first basic research organizations in Europe. The CSIC
consisted in 2006 of 126 centers and institutes distributed throughout
Spain.
CSIC is attached to the Ministry of
Education and its main objective is to promote scientific research as to
improve the progress of the scientific and technological level of the
country which will contribute to increase the welfare of the citizens.
CSIC also plays an important role in the
formation of new researchers and technicians in the different aspects
of the science and the technology.
The organization collaborates with other
institutions of the Spanish R&D system (universities, autonomous
governs, other public and private research organisms) and with social,
economic, national or foreign agents to which contributes with its
research capacity and human and material resources in the development of
research projects or under the form of consultancy and scientific and
technical support. CSIC was founded in 1939 from a previous body, the
Junta para la Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas
created in 1907 under the leadership of the Spanish Nobel Prize Prof.
Ramón y Cajal.
The laboratory is located at the Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales
(CCHS). This center started during 2007 and originated from the merge
in one place of the different centers and institutes devoted to the
Social and Humanity Sciences that belongs to the CSIC and were located
in Madrid.
The Cybermetrics Lab,
part of the CCHS - CSIC, is devoted to the quantitative analysis of the
Internet and Web contents specially those related to the processes of
generation and scholarly communication of scientific knowledge. This is a
new emerging discipline that has been called Cybermetrics (our team
developed and publishes the free electronic journal Cybermetrics since 1997) or Webometrics.
The Cybermetrics Lab using quantitative
methods has designed and applied indicators that allow us to measure the
scientific activity on the Web. The cybermetric indicators are useful
to evaluate science and technology and they are the perfect complement
to the results obtained with bibliometric methods in scientometric
studies.
The specific areas of research include:
The specific areas of research include:
- Development of Web indicators to be applied on the areas of the Spanish, European, Latinamerican and World R&D
- Quantitative studies about the scientific communication through electronic journals and repositories, and the impact of the Open Access initiatives.
- Development of indicators about resources in the Society of Information
- Indicators and social networks visualization on the Web with friendly, dynamic and interactive graphic interfaces
- Desing and evaluation of documental analysis techniques of Web resources
- Genre studies applied to the scholar activity on the Web
- Development of applied cybermetrics techniques based on the positioning on search engines of Web domains
- Analysis of the information usage through Web data mining of log files
Webometrics official web site: http://www.webometrics.info
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