southern: Actually this list is pretty accurate because it focuses on separate faculties ranking(medical schools).
The faculty ranking info must be written in some invisible ink, which my browser is not able to detect.:-) What the heck are you talking about?
What I see here instead is that their ranking is based on the number of web based publications, both formal and informal, and - more likely than not - not peer-viewed.
So, I agree with Sidliste_Chodov: this is a general university ranking, solely based on the web traffic. Although interesting as a method, the validity of such ranking could be easily questioned. For example, what conclusion could you draw from the following table, taken from the same website, http://www.webometrics.info/Size_by_Domain_World.asp ?
It displays number of pages, in millions, country by country, published in specific domains, but also in all domains altogether. Below are some results in this simplified format: (rank, country, millions-of-pages-from-all-domains)
(1 USA 33807)
(2 China 9764)
(3 Japan 7919)
(4 Germany 6544)
(5 UK 4238)
(6 Russia 3567)
(7 S.Korea 3244)
(8 Poland 3111)
and there are 42 more countries trailing Poland, including (9 France 2954), (14 Canada 1946), etc. At the first glance this is stupefying, isn't it? But if you know a little about Poland you can easily recall that there is a lot of universities/colleges in Poland - both public and private - of various qualities, which publish a lot of internal scientific, or quasi scientific, papers. This is why this statistic is obviously screwed.
Secondly, this page is self-promoting. For example, here is their advice given to academic institutions, currently ranked low:
We intend to motivate both institutions and scholars to have a web presence that reflect accurately their activities. If the web performance of an institution is below the expected position according to their academic excellence, university authorities should reconsider their web policy, promoting substantial increases of the volume and quality of their electronic publications.
http://www.webometrics.info/about_rank.html
But let us assume for a moment, that their statistics makes more sense when broken into individual domains, such as amu.edu.pl (A Mickiewicz University, Poznań) or ump.edu.pl (Poznań University of Medical Sciences). If you care to follow a self deprecating Balkan shepherd :-)
and have some fun, try to extract the world rank of the first five best schools, country by country. I checked data from some former communist countries - Central and Eastern Europe - plus Russia and Greece for a good measure. Suddenly the 2675 rank of Medical School in Poznań does not look that bad at all!
Obviously, most of these schools should really work hard to catch up with the well established Western European schools. But here are some observations nevertheless:
1. The Czech Republic universities have the best ranking in average (of five best schools), in the group I have chosen, but Poland is not that much behind.
2. The well established Greece is more or less at the same level as Poland, so Greeks have nothing to be overly proud of.
3. Russia - surprise, surprise - is not even close to Poland.
4. Some Balkan countries, such as Serbia, do not even register on the basic scale. No data available.
5. Most Balkan countries are ranked at the 2000-4000 level, way, way behind Poland - (300-600)
So, girls and boys, take it easy when reading and interpreting various university rankings.
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