[0:10]Hello everyone. Welcome. Welcome to a mastering ranking. What are we going to be mastering today? Webometrics rankings. Mind how I pronounce this. I did not say webometric rankings, I said webometrics rankings.
[0:25]Today is a wonderful day, wonderful morning, evening, wonderful Sunday morning, nice in the evening after myself, service. March 8, 2026. I am, you're sincerely, Peter Okebukola. Now let's see what's going to, what's cooking for this lesson.
[0:43]Wonderful things, by the way. Going to be looking at history and origins of webometrics ranking, methodology, ranking, African performance and the rest of them. Let's start with the history and origins of webometrics ranking.
[0:57]That word, Webometrics, was coined in 1997 by Almend and Ingwersen. Where they derived metric, metric, measure like metrics, quantitative study of academic publications, measuring the thing. So when you apply it to the web is webometrics. And the early proponents, CSIC's Cybermetrics Lab, became the institution into the Ranking Web of Universities by Isidro, is the principal architect.
[1:29]Isidro in 19, 2007, where I had to go, we had to go to see him to to his lab in Madrid, in Spain. Now you can see this photo, it's a 2007 photo.
[1:45]2007, yeah, 2007, that is 19 years ago. That is Peter Okebukola, wow, in 19 years ago, I see Peter Okebukola now. Well, I thank God for his grace, thank God for his mercy that one is alive and kicking, you know, today.
[2:03]Isidro, tall guy, very nice person. So we were there in his laboratory to see about this Webometrics ranking. By the way, by 2007, I just finished the previous year, being the Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission. I was in Abuja there, as years, five years.
[2:21]So let's see what the concept is. Concept of the ranking thing. 2004 was the first edition, and the rationale is that you want to promote open access to knowledge generated by universities. So by 2004 was first edition, as I said.
[2:38]Two editions per year adopted in 2008, methodology updated to reflect digital landscape changes, and 2003 to 2004, transparent ranking introduced alongside main rankings. So what's the philosophy behind, I just said it, that the belief is that the university's web presence is a proxy for your commitment to the dissemination of knowledge.
[3:10]I mean if you go to a website and I'm able to see the research that scholars in that university are doing, I'm able to see all the, all the, all the elements of scholarship, that's a proxy for how you're disseminating knowledge.
[3:28]For webometrics ranking, you know, you do a survey, nothing like that. No surveys of anything. And it's fully automated. What does that mean? There's the web crawler, crawl that the cybernetics Lab developed, it will crawl through the web and go to your domain, lasu.edu.ng, and check out what knowledge we are disseminating.
[3:51]On that basis, based on the indicators that we're going to see, you will now access and get the data for us. I tell you something, some vice chancellors that well, the universities are not aware. I said no, no, we don't want to participate. No, whether you like it or not, you are ranked.
[4:08]So it's not like the others that we talking about over the last few days, over the last few lessons that you apply. Say, I want to be, you write an email. Nothing. Isido, you don't need to write no email. So it's automated. You, you are ranked whether you like it or not.
[4:24]Open access aligned, Africa's opportunity institutions investing in digital scholarly output can improve rapidly without large financial outlay. I give you an example. In 2000, it was when Professor Olede, great man, was the Vice Chancellor of University of Ilorin. He invited me to come and run a workshop for University of Ilorin on webometrics ranking.
[4:52]I was there for two solid days and all the staff, we went through the whole thing. I tell you, the next publication of webometrics ranking, Ilorin went from number 40 something to number one. So little or no investment. Let's look at the methodology.
[5:08]How does webometrics collect the data? Google Search, web presence and rich file indexing, crawls all publicly indexed pages under the institution's primary domain. And the rest here. So, entirely web-sourced, no questionnaire or surveys.
[5:35]So what are the indicator, we'll be talking about pillars of indicators. For this one, how many? Three, three pillars. The first is presence. The number of web pages indexed by Google under the institution's primary domain, reflects volume of academic web content.
[5:51]So, if Google does a search, crawls to you, the crawler goes gets to your site, and is able to see more public, a little number of publications, then you're light weight. But when there's plentiful, then you have that presence.
[6:08]So it reflects volume, volume of academic web content. So what is to be done? The strategy is to more indexable web pages. Let's look at the other one. Transparency. 10%.
[6:23]So the citations received by the top 210 cited authors in your university, as captured in Google Scholar. Eh, Google Scholar, you see the role it's going to be playing as we go along now. Reflects researcher visibility. What's the strategy? Strategy is to complete Google Scholar profiles, all the stuff.
[6:44]Excellence 85%, papers in the top 10% most cited globally across 26 disciplines. What should we do? Strategies to increase your Scopus publications. Let's look at the excellence thing in more detail. So why excellence dominate, why is excellence dominating?
[6:58]It's not just to put all kind of uh, uh, materials on the site. They have to be those that are genuinely scholarly output. Else it will just represent hollow digital noise. It'll be noise with all the web materials that you put on the site. Publications must be indexed in Scopus to count.
[7:21]Then, institutional affiliation on Google Scholar profiles must be precise and consistent. All publications must be claimed and verified in each researcher's profile. Now, when we compare webometrics with other global rankings of feature on this on these features, you use survey, no survey here. All these ones survey.
[7:42]ARWU, as you are familiar with, that we did in the last lesson, does not conduct no survey. Data sources, web, uh, Scopus, surveys and Scopus, surveys and Scopus, this simply clearly webometrics. Institutions covered, you can see webometrics, 31,000+. QS, see that. Cost to access, free. Nobody's charging nobody anything.
[8:06]So when you run, look, we'll be, I've been running, uh, the running ranking for Nigerian universities forever and a day. No, not forever and a day, it's 2001. No charging nobody anything. So it should be good, been running this thing for free. Africa, well, the editions are Africa or whatever, for webometrics, twice a year.
[8:30]January and July. All these other ones are annual. Now, so what's the annual ranking cycle timeline? January comes out, July comes out. Right. Uh, so the January edition. So what, January edition, data collection in December, results published in January, of course.
[8:47]So you can see a month, data collection. But let's look at the July edition. We are now in March, today is March the 8th. We are now in March. So for the July edition that you all should be aiming at. Data collection is in June. So we have to improve things, so improve it right now.
[9:03]Like I said, for, uh, Ilorin, in two days, I got it done. And Kwara State University, uh, also, uh, asking them to, to up their game in regarding to that. For Lagos State University, of course, we are, we are moving on, that's my primary base.
[9:19]So result published in July, preparation window March now to May. Key action, open access, join all, open access uploads, Scopus submission push. So what calendar are we looking at? January, analyze results. What, what does that mean?
[9:35]When the results are out, they are actually out by now. Look at the results for your institution. Analyze it and then benchmark against comparable institutions. Okay, so you are a private university established 10 years ago and then you have another one 10 years ago. Jump up. So, do a, do a mapping, do a benchmark against that institution.
[9:57]Then February, you audit Google Scholar profiles, identify unclaimed profiles. March, upload open access publications to institutional repository. April, review and optimize university website, fix all broken links. Don't be, you know, you'll get a web, webmaster. Yeah, tell your webmaster and you that you have been trained. Please, check these things out and knock the door of your web, webmaster, ICT department. Hey, these links are broken, fix them.
[10:25]So May, launch faculty training on Scopus. Run training. Prossor Lakpejuyi mentioned here, our last meeting of Monday. Launch training on Scopus and Google Scholar profile management. Yeah, Prossor Adeoye also mentioned that. June, final checks before data collection. Before they start collecting data, so you do your check.
[10:46]By July, results are out again. Analyze, update institutional action plan. September, and it goes on. The six-month cycle. What African universities, how would they do? How are we performing? Well, uh, these are African universities listed there, and uh, UCT, University of Cape Town is among the one 800, you know, typically well ranked. But look at this one here.
[11:10]Southern Africa, up, up, up there. North Africa, well not so much there. This is descending. East Africa, then West Africa, not doing relative, relatively now, not doing as well as the others. Nigeria, Ghana, below continental average, but we have high potential.
[11:32]So what are the top African universities in webometrics? Cape Town is right up there. Consistently Africa's highest ranked institution. Stellenbosch, Wits, excuse me, Wits, Pretoria. I wanted to pronounce it like a one villager. Say Wits. University of Wits. Pretoria. University of Johannesburg. So, yeah. Cairo, East Africa, yeah, that's the point. But let's come to Nigeria.
[11:57]Nigerian universities, uh, the ones that they're coming out for that Isidro thinks about 260+. But we have 309 universities as I'm speaking today, March the 8th, 2026. Ibadan is coming off. First is number one. Number two is Covenant. You see Covenant is like, a baby born yesterday.
[12:20]But by the commitment of Bishop David Oyedepo and the staff of Covenant University, they are moving on very well. On many, many occasions they overtuked Ibadan. Been number one. University of Lagos is coming number three. This one 1948. 1960. So you can see Covenant University 2000 and yesterday.
[12:40]OAU there. Ahmadu Bello. What am I saying here? What I'm saying here is that with commitment and with sanctions of, uh, staff that will not want to do Google Scholar, will not want to publish in Scopus, then you can go nowhere. Now, let's look at the performance gaps. Key performance, key performance gaps.
[12:59]Low for Nigerian universities. Low volume of Scopus indexed publications relative to institutional size. Absence of fully functional, publicly accessible institutional open-access repositories in most universities. What do I mean by that? Every university should have a repository where you have open access, public accessible, uh, institutional documentation there.
[13:26]So large proportion of academic staff without active, verified Google Scholar profiles, properly affiliated to their institution. This one a big problem. Because when we're doing the 2002, 2022 rankings, we find that many universities, many staff of the university, they don't have Google Scholar profiles. But I'm sure things would have improved.
[13:48]Especially the professors. They are come to that in a minute. And that's that's very sad. When they don't get professors, you should finish. Uh, that's all. You come to you come to the office. Hey, can you pull in so, they won't answer you. Yeah, but they are dead. They are shooting the, the, the university's foot. They are shooting themselves in the foot in terms of visibility of their university and the and the ranking.
[14:11]University websites poorly structured for Google indexing. Broken links. Outdated pages. No staff profile. Domain fragmentation. Multiple hosting platforms, non-standard domains, and inconsistent subdomains. So what are the trends? Covenant University. I mentioned it before. The rise demonstrates that deliberate open-access policy can deliver measurable ranking gains within two years.
[14:39]And TETFund research grants are increasingly, we are happy about that, channeled towards Scopus-indexed publications. NUC's ranking awareness campaigns. That's what NURAK is doing, are prompting several universities to launch web optimization and profile management drives. Uh, some five, six years ago, my team, we ranked Nigerian universities, their websites. And that prompted many to wake up.
[15:05]Yeah, Nigeria has the largest university system in West Africa. Harnessing collective output could rapidly shift Continental average. Yes. NURAK, oh yeah, NURAK, our NURAK, Nigerian University Ranking Advisory Committee is building institutional capacity, just like this. We have been doing this forever and a day, no, no. Not forever and a day, over the last three years to track and improve webometrics performance across Nigerian universities. So root causes of African underperformance.
[15:30]I've given out of Nigeria. We can scale that up to Africa. No Scopus content, weak open access repositories, poor website architecture, profile gaps, domain inconsistencies, uh, limited digital investment. So what are the strategies for improvement? That's what we've said. That's what I've been saying.
[15:52]Pillar one. Research output and publication quality. You should target Scopus Q1 and Q2 indexed journals. Open access and the rest. You can see. Pillar two, open access and digital visibility. Upload full text of every permissible publication.
[16:14]That's what we did in Ilorin, and that's what I've been doing for some other universities. Project reports of your students on the graduate, postgraduate, inaugural lectures, or books. All upload them. So pillar three, mandatory Google Scholar profiles for all academic staff. So versus that afraid of some professors. Yeah, you want to find, some professors, they get that speak big English. I said it. Big, that's all. Go and check their scholarship, real scholarship.
[16:47]Google Scholar profiles. Not too good. Not too good. I didn't want to use the word I should use because I didn't for this thing. So, not too good. I'm not talking about Nigeria, I'm talking about Africa-wide. You get a professor, and then you check out the, uh, Google Scholar, or research, visible research, uh, Scopus, uh, index journals. And they're super poor, super poor. But the shame of it is that the younger ones that are coming, these are the people that are supervising them. They are doing, they are, they are not helping matters at all.
[17:20]I give you an example of, of, of a case of Peter Okebukola, oh yes, Peter, trumpet, I don't bring trumpet now. Uh, uh, Dr. Kulola, Dr. Okasongwi, Dr. Peter, Dr. Akbaminimu, my, my, my students, the recent ones, PH students, artificial intelligence, cyber security, education, people. One year, oh yes, one year. 1000+ Ade Kulola, you go and Google him. Google Scholar, Ade Kulola, go and see it.
[17:56]So, look, when you no rest as vice chancellor. When you no rest as professor. Me, I don't, I don't, I'm supposed to be resting now. And the others, but some, they are just, I don't want to use some, some words. So, let's make it mandatory and let these professors be professing more. So, standing the academic excellence indicator, target journal selection, international collaboration, publication incentives, pre-print and open. So, strength, transparency and presence indicators, all academic staff must create a verified Google Scholar profile affiliated with the institution.
[18:35]I can't under stress that. I can't overstress that. Assign a faculty webometrics champion. Get somebody in your faculty, even in the department to be a webometric officer to audit profiles quarterly. Now use a single, stable primary domain consistently. All right, webometrics Steering Committee is set up. Webometrics Coordinator, let's have it. Biannual webometrics performance report to Senate. Every time the result is released. Let there be, the webometrics coordinator, do a a performance report to Senate. Benchmark against five comparable regional institutions like we have been doing. So, these are some tools that you can use for implementing webometrics.info, scopus.com, orcid.org and the rest. So, time for a break.
[19:28]Yeah, welcome from a very short break and we're going to do Practical 7. Practical 7 is gap analysis in webometrics ranking. We, we'll be doing gap analysis for the others. So we're going to do the same. So Practical 7, gap analysis on the three pillars of 2026 webometrics ranking. So you put all that. So the name, gap analysis. The name of the number one in the world in webometrics ranking of 2026, just put it there. Uh, name of number two. So what, what do you have for overall visibility, excellence, openness? Uh, I check, I find that maybe you can't get that data for 2026, but if you use, uh, a a an AI tool, AI agent, you may be able to get this. Number one in Africa, number one in Nigeria, or your country, and your university. Put your university there and then let's have it.
[20:16]Then do a gap, a graph of the gap analysis. You discuss your results. So what you have as the marking scheme, the data on gap analysis, 600, graph 800, discussion and the rest. So, 3,200 marks for Practical 7. Okay, let me give you a demonstration.
[20:39]We are going to use what you call shortcut to success. So, you know, you can see this category. I've changed the number one in Nigeria. Okay, your country. Okay, then you put your university there. So you just copy this table and then you go to, uh, an AI tool, AI agent and say, let let me show you. So, I'll just, uh, well, what I have here is provide data for the latest webometrics rankings for this table. Number one in the world, number one in Africa, number one in Nigeria, then Lagos State University, Nigeria. So, you have all of these things here, uh, name of institution and all of that. So, let me just copy this and I will land it in, uh, let's take Chat GPT for us. Yeah, so Chat GPT, what am I working on? All right, I, I've copied it and I've pasted it here. So let, let's, let's see what he comes up with. Searching the web. Yes, search what I want to search. All right. In January 2026 edition. That's what you have here. So you can see that's the table. That's the table. So you're taking just a few minutes to do that. Number one in the world, Harvard, overall rank, all of that. So that's the thing. That's, uh, what you are expected to do. Yeah, so you've seen the demo now, not a big deal. Now, what are the three takeaways for this lesson? Webometrics, the world's largest. The three indicators, presence, transparency and each demand specific targeted strategies. African universities, we must significantly, we, we'll have significant improvement potential, potential, potential, particularly in Scopus publications, open access, and research profile management. What's next lesson going to look at? We have a poetry of the remaining. Going to take all the remaining. US News and World Report, uh, Leiden ranking, center for world university rankings. And then I'm going to take the individual scholarly rankings, E.G. scientific and Clarivate from me, Peter Okebukola.
[22:38]This is bye-bye for now. See you next lesson. Bye-bye.
