Scientific research activity and communication measured with cybermetrics indicators

To test feasibility of cybermetric indicators for describing and ranking university activities as shown in their Web sites, a large set of 9,330 institutions worldwide was compiled and analyzed. Using search engines' advanced features, size (number of pages), visibility (number of external inlinks), and number of rich files (pdf, ps, doc, ppt, and As formats) were obtained for each of the institutional domains of the universities. We found a statistically significant correlation between a Web ranking built on a combination of Webometric data and other university rankings based on bibliometric and other indicators. Results show that cybermetric measures could be useful for reflecting the contribution of technologically oriented institutions, increasing the visibility of developing countries, and improving the rankings based on Science Citation Index (SCI) data with known biases.