Webometrics’ latest global ranking of universities in 2023 has ranked all of South Africa’s universities based on the quality, quantity, and access to their web content, using open data.
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.
The research group’s ranking has a special focus on open access to data from global universities and lists institutions based on the quantity and quality of their web content.
The group stresses that the ranking has nothing to do with university websites – ie., the popularity, design or accessibility – but rather link analysis, which includes bibliographic citations used by other university rankings and also third-party involvement with university activities.
“Research output is also a key topic for webometrics, including not only formal – e-journals, repositories – publications but also informal scholarly communication.
“Web publication is cheaper, maintaining the high standards of quality of peer review processes. It could also reach much larger potential audiences, offering access to scientific knowledge to researchers and institutions located in developing countries and also to third parties (economic, industrial, political or cultural stakeholders) in their local community,” the group said.
Using webometrics, the group focused the 2022 ranking on three main indicators:
- Visibility: The number of external networks (subnets) linking to the institution’s web pages ( weighted 50%)
- Transparency or Openness: The number of citations from the Top 310 authors, excluding the top 30 outliers (10%)
- Excellence: The number of papers amongst the top 10% most cited in each one of all 27 disciplines of the full database over the last five years (40%)
Because the ranking pulls its bibliographic data from many of the same sources, the list of top institutions closely follows that of other rankings. However, the Cybermetrics Lab says its ranking differentiates itself by excluding “subjective” indicators like feedback from surveys and unreliable reporting from the universities themselves.
The caveats to its data include bad naming practices by universities and sharing top-level domains – or changing these domains frequently – which can penalise their performance in the ranking.
Because of the web-based nature of the data collected, the Webometrics ranking also covers a staggering number of higher learning institutions – over 31,000 – including many of the smaller colleges and institutes often left out of other global rankings.
However, because all these institutions are ranked together, no distinction is explicitly made, so colleges, universities and theological seminaries are all listed together.
For South Africa, 123 higher learning institutes were ranked, falling between 246th and 29,531st in the world. South Africa has 26 public universities, including 12 traditional universities, six comprehensive universities, and eight universities of technology. All universities feature in the rankings.
The University of Cape Town (UCT) was the top-ranked university in the country, following the same trend seen in other university rankings.
UCT is followed by the University of the Witwatersrand, Stellenbosch University and the University of Pretoria. These were the only universities ranked within the top 500 globally.
Within the top 1000, the University of KwaZulu Nata, the University of Johannesburg, Unisa and the University of the Western Cape follow.
The full ranking of South African universities is below:
| Local # | University | Global # |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | University of Cape Town | 246 |
| 2 | University of the Witwatersrand | 398 |
| 3 | Stellenbosch University | 438 |
| 4 | University of Pretoria | 450 |
| 5 | University of KwaZulu Natal | 598 |
| 6 | University of Johannesburg | 653 |
| 7 | University of South Africa | 795 |
| 8 | University of the Western Cape | 927 |
| 9 | University of the Free State | 1106 |
| 10 | Rhodes University | 1138 |
| 11 | Cape Peninsula University of Technology | 1593 |
| 12 | North-West University | 1668 |
| 13 | Tshwane University of Technology | 1717 |
| 14 | Durban University of Technology | 1856 |
| 15 | University of Fort Hare | 2339 |
| 16 | University of Limpopo | 2710 |
| 17 | Nelson Mandela University | 2715 |
| 18 | University of Venda | 2941 |
| 19 | Vaal University of Technology | 3198 |
| 20 | Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University | 3270 |
| 21 | University of Zululand | 3280 |
| 22 | Central University of Technology | 3570 |
| 23 | Walter Sisulu University | 3761 |
| 24 | University of Mpumalanga | 7935 |
| 25 | Mangosuthu University of Technology | 8262 |
| 26 | Sol Plaatje University | 9459 |
Global Universities
The ranking of global universities aligns closely with other global rankings, with Harvard University in the United States taking top honours.
This is followed by Standford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California Berkeley.
The top 10 is dominated by US institutes, with the only non-US institution in the top 10 being the University of Oxford, ranking 5th, while the University of Cambridge falls just outside the top 10 at 12th.
| Global# | University | Country |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Harvard University | US |
| 2 | Stanford University | US |
| 3 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | US |
| 4 | University of California Berkeley | US |
| 5 | University of Oxford | UK |
| 6 | University of Michigan | US |
| 7 | University of Washington | US |
| 8 | Cornell University | US |
| 9 | Columbia University New York | US |
| 10 | Johns Hopkins University | US |
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