On Campus

Ranking the world’s universities by web presence

University rankings are admittedly controversial and their use, misuse and abuse are the source of frequent controversy in post-secondary education circles. Of the 50 or so major university rankings systems in use, the principal international rankings are prepared by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the Times Higher Education Supplement.

According to the Webometrics Ranking of World’s Universities, published by the Spanish National Research Council’s Cybermetrics Lab, U.S. and Canadian universities account for more than 60% of the world’s top 200 universities. These bi-annual rankings rate over 16,000 universities world-wide according to the size and quality of their Internet presence. The top ten Canadian universities amongst the Webometrics Top 4,000 are as follows (overall ranking in brackets):

  1. University of Toronto (24)
  2. University of British Columbia (38)
  3. University of Alberta (61)
  4. Simon Fraser University (62)
  5. Université de Montreal (63)
  6. University of Calgary (69)
  7. Mcgill University (91)
  8. University of Waterloo (94)
  9. Université Laval (110)
  10. York University (113)

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