The University of the Philippines in Diliman regained
the top spot among Philippine higher education institutions (HEIs) in the
January 2025 Webometrics Ranking
of World Universities…
Is that good news
for UP Diliman? Nah! “Globally, UP
Diliman ranked 938th out of nearly 32,000 HEIs in the list.” What about my
alma mater UP Los Baños? Not mentioned – hu hu hu!
Mr Servallos again:
“The bi-annual
world site rankings are published by the Cybermetrics
Lab of the Spanish National
Research Council… It tracks HEIs through the volume of content on their
website, the visibility of these content and the impact of the published
materials based on how much these are linked to other research materials
online.”
Above, note UP's
Oblation statue covered with a cloth that does not belong to the statue itself
– it so happens that the question of Webometrics covers all 8 component
universities of the UP System!
“Globally, UP
Diliman ranked 938th out of nearly 32,000 HEIs in the list.” How proud can you
be of that?!
“The Ranking Web
is not a ranking of university websites, but a ranking of universities
themselves.”
“The primary
objective of the Ranking Web is to promote open access to the knowledge
generated by universities.”
So! I see that by
virtue of the presence of the Internet, there has been a dynamic added
role of universities: “promote open access to the knowledge generated by
universities.”
And how does a
university do that? “The best strategy for improving a university’s rank is to
increase the quantity and quality of its web content, which significantly
enhances the transfer of scientific and cultural knowledge to society.”
Now, from 40 years of experience in editing technical
reports, This Editor In Chief knows that for higher global ranking, to improve
a university’s web content, it needs to produce higher-quality scientific and
cultural knowledge. Which calls for producing higher-quality technical reports
out of its own research results. Which calls for higher-quality technical
journals.
About
“higher-quality technical journals” – I have had personal experience. When I
was already 78 years old, I became The Editor In Chief of the Philippine Journal of Crop Science
(PJCS) in 2003 when it was already 3 years late
in its issues. What happened? I made the PJCS up-to-date
in 3 years – that means I worked doubletime –
and brought the journal to the coveted international level of ISI (now
“Web Of Science”) the next year. Impossible but true!
The lesson here
from Webometrics from me is this:
For a university to rank high worldwide and serve
millions more people via its researches, it must produce high-quality research
reports in high-quality journals. Where are the high-quality editors when you
need them most? This old editor can teach them a trick or two!@517
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