Indicadores Webmétricos de carácter formal para evaluar el posicionamiento de las universidades: el caso de los Países Árabes

Abstract

Cybermetric indicators are powerful tools for assessing internet information resources of specific domains. In response to the underlying subjectivity of most qualitative analysis indicators currently in use, the purpose of this paper is to apply structural quality indicators exclusively in order to objectively assess the Web Ranking of Arab Universities of the Middle East and North African region (MENA). The results obtained show that is possible to use structural indicators to assess the quality and rank of university websites. Moreover, the correlation between link analysis and structural analysis indicator is not sufficiently significant to assert that those universities with high rankings also were ranked highest in terms of structural indicators. This paper serves as a precedent for further research on universities that are currently more concerned with discovering their ranking as a function of the link networks existing between the universities themselves, than assessing ranking in terms of the structural features of their websites.