01 februari 2007
The position of Wageningen UR in the European academic Web
Lists, rankings and top 10's.
Managers love these. That applies to the managers of our university as well. They really like the ESI rankings (albeit we're loosing some prestige) or those from Newsweek and THES. A new type of ranking is based on webometrics. Link analysis of websites that is. A group of researchers from Spain has been quite active in this field. They posted a preprint of their analysis from the European academic Web on E-Lis. Interesting reading.
In Europe, the UK and Germany are the two most inter-linked academic Web communities. The Netherlands sits somewhat closer to the UK. The UvA and VU are two of the better linked universities in the Netherlands. Wageningen UR is a midget somewhat distant from the center where the real action takes place. This is perhaps partly due to the older web address the researchers have used in their investigation. But looking closer at their Website Webometrics which is part of their ongoing research, reveals some real problems for the Web-identity of our university.
As main university website they have still listed our old domain, but next to that there is Larenstein (perhaps rightfully so). And they have listed a portal Bioinformatics at Wageningen University and the Graduate School Experimental Plant Sciences as separate identities as well. Our position as a combined university and research institute is even more diluted by the fact that some of the research institutes are treated as separate distinct identities as well. To mention a few: Alterra-ILRI, CIDC (listed at two Web adresses) CRC, RIKILT also listed under two addresses, Wageningen Feed Processing Centre, Wageningen Institute of Animal Sciences (should actually be listed as a school). Wageningen NMR center, Wageningen UR and ISRIC also with two addresses.
There is plenty of room for criticism on the Spanish website and their selection of websites of Institutes. They also list redirected pages. Our university website(s) don't make matters any easier for these foreign investigators. There is for instance no sitemap available (would improve spidering of the website by search engines as well). Furthermore there are still too many seemingly independent websites that bear hardly any relation (in their domain) with Wageningen UR. Take for instance WIAS, VLAG or Plantenwetenschappen. They are one hunderd percent related to the University, but nothing in the web address (or layout) that shows for this relationship. There are whole legions of exotic websites such as Syscope, de Natuurkalender or IBL etc.…These websites should be used to improve the web presence of our University by making them integral part of the WUR domain.
What does it matter?
Well those Webometricians do their research. Fair enough, but that is not only academic inquisitiveness. Those are not mere theoretical exercises. Popular search engines work on exactly the same principles. Our web presence is in dire need for improvement. Look for instance at the traffic of three of our major domains. Wau.nl generates more traffic than Wageningenuniversiteit.nl. And we had a very expensive operation to move everything to a single web domain, with a brand new layout, and it was declared a success. Only when you look at the traffic at the previous link over a somewhat longer period you get some interesting graphs. Since the change in December 2005, total traffic plummeted, and the Wageningenuniversiteit.nl site never attracted really more traffic than the old wau.nl site. It is now more than a year after the whole operation and all kind of redirect pages are still afloat and attract a lot of traffic. Improving visibility and performance of a single wur domain seems badly needed.
But what really pleases me though, our library website generates 39% of the all WUR traffic. The library in the heart of the organization that is. WoW!
This is of course a laughing farmer with a very serious toothache.
Literature
Ortega, J. L., I. Aguillo, et al. (2007) Maps of the academic web in the European Higher Education Area - an exploration of visual web indicators. E-LIS http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00005038/
Managers love these. That applies to the managers of our university as well. They really like the ESI rankings (albeit we're loosing some prestige) or those from Newsweek and THES. A new type of ranking is based on webometrics. Link analysis of websites that is. A group of researchers from Spain has been quite active in this field. They posted a preprint of their analysis from the European academic Web on E-Lis. Interesting reading.
In Europe, the UK and Germany are the two most inter-linked academic Web communities. The Netherlands sits somewhat closer to the UK. The UvA and VU are two of the better linked universities in the Netherlands. Wageningen UR is a midget somewhat distant from the center where the real action takes place. This is perhaps partly due to the older web address the researchers have used in their investigation. But looking closer at their Website Webometrics which is part of their ongoing research, reveals some real problems for the Web-identity of our university.
As main university website they have still listed our old domain, but next to that there is Larenstein (perhaps rightfully so). And they have listed a portal Bioinformatics at Wageningen University and the Graduate School Experimental Plant Sciences as separate identities as well. Our position as a combined university and research institute is even more diluted by the fact that some of the research institutes are treated as separate distinct identities as well. To mention a few: Alterra-ILRI, CIDC (listed at two Web adresses) CRC, RIKILT also listed under two addresses, Wageningen Feed Processing Centre, Wageningen Institute of Animal Sciences (should actually be listed as a school). Wageningen NMR center, Wageningen UR and ISRIC also with two addresses.
There is plenty of room for criticism on the Spanish website and their selection of websites of Institutes. They also list redirected pages. Our university website(s) don't make matters any easier for these foreign investigators. There is for instance no sitemap available (would improve spidering of the website by search engines as well). Furthermore there are still too many seemingly independent websites that bear hardly any relation (in their domain) with Wageningen UR. Take for instance WIAS, VLAG or Plantenwetenschappen. They are one hunderd percent related to the University, but nothing in the web address (or layout) that shows for this relationship. There are whole legions of exotic websites such as Syscope, de Natuurkalender or IBL etc.…These websites should be used to improve the web presence of our University by making them integral part of the WUR domain.
What does it matter?
Well those Webometricians do their research. Fair enough, but that is not only academic inquisitiveness. Those are not mere theoretical exercises. Popular search engines work on exactly the same principles. Our web presence is in dire need for improvement. Look for instance at the traffic of three of our major domains. Wau.nl generates more traffic than Wageningenuniversiteit.nl. And we had a very expensive operation to move everything to a single web domain, with a brand new layout, and it was declared a success. Only when you look at the traffic at the previous link over a somewhat longer period you get some interesting graphs. Since the change in December 2005, total traffic plummeted, and the Wageningenuniversiteit.nl site never attracted really more traffic than the old wau.nl site. It is now more than a year after the whole operation and all kind of redirect pages are still afloat and attract a lot of traffic. Improving visibility and performance of a single wur domain seems badly needed.
But what really pleases me though, our library website generates 39% of the all WUR traffic. The library in the heart of the organization that is. WoW!
This is of course a laughing farmer with a very serious toothache.
Literature
Ortega, J. L., I. Aguillo, et al. (2007) Maps of the academic web in the European Higher Education Area - an exploration of visual web indicators. E-LIS http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00005038/
Labels: English, SEO, Universities, University rankings, Wageningen UR
14 januari 2007
Highly cited scientists in the Netherlands and their Alma Mater
ISIhighlyCited.com is a free database from ISI in which they list all of the 250 most cited scientists, over the last 10 years, in the world for each of the 22 major subfields of science. These fields range from Agriculture to Social sciences and everything in between.
Once a scientist is selected for this database they are notified by ISI (Thomson Scientific) and are kindly requested to complete their scientific CV which is listed in the database. So the researchers themselves are in charge in the way they are presented in this database. For instance when Martijn Katan moved from Wageningen University to the VU in Amsrerdam he changed his address in that database.
Once a scientist is selected for this database they are notified by ISI (Thomson Scientific) and are kindly requested to complete their scientific CV which is listed in the database. So the researchers themselves are in charge in the way they are presented in this database. For instance when Martijn Katan moved from Wageningen University to the VU in Amsrerdam he changed his address in that database.
One little thing that still puzzles me, is that ISI lists 91 highly cited researchers, but that includes one scientist from Belgium, and another one probably from Spain (I did not bother to sort that out any further) but it is striking for the impression that it leaves for the quality of ISI databases in general. So I consider that the Netherlands has only 89 highly cited scientists.
What does it further matter you might wonder. The ISIhighlyCited is being used for the Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings. The number of highly cited scientist accounts for 20% of the score. Okay, so what for these rankings? Only that these ranking are regularly quoted in the Economist, which is read by potential students, or by people in charge of allocation of research funds. But there is more. The (yearly?) ranking of Newsweek is for 1/6 determined by this same data as well. Which is read by potential students or people in charge of...... You get the gest. It all has to do with branding, with name building, with reputation. In the scientific world that is dependent to a large extend on the affiliations mentioned in the scholarly papers published in peer reviewed journals, and subsequently abstracted in bibliographies and other databases such as ISIhighlycited.com.
Researcher connected to our university who has decided to list himself under the affiliation of his sub-institute. I really wonder if the It is therefore very interesting to see under which affiliations these top researchers list themselves. In Wageningen the naming of the university appears to be very difficult. 13 research use 4 different names. We see Wageningen Agricultural University (4x), WageningenUniversiteit (5x), Wagenignen University (3x) and Wageningen University and Research Centre (1x). Slightly odd to see the Dutch name of the Univerity listed in an international database. But perhaps the people from Shanghai are smart enough to count all of these variations as one. However there is a 14th highly cited researcher from Wageningen. I do really wonder if the people from Shanghai recognize whether RIKILT - Institute of Food Safety is also part of Wageningen University?
So we score in Wageningen 14 of the 89 highly cited researchers in the Netherlands. Not too bad. Not too bad at all. Looking at the other Universities, Leiden has 15 highly cited researchers, who produced 6 different affiliations. Utrecht ends ex aequo with Wageningen on a shared 2-3 place behind Leiden. In Utrecht I count 6 different names for the university. 4th is the VU with 10 highly cited researcher (including Katan) they came up with only 4 different variations of their university's name and the UvA is only 5th with 8 highly cited researchers.
Not bad for Wageningen University anyway. Only next time should these highly esteemed professors spell the name of their Alma Mater correctly. Then we will really celebrate.
Not bad for Wageningen University anyway. Only next time should these highly esteemed professors spell the name of their Alma Mater correctly. Then we will really celebrate.
Labels: Affiliations, English, ISI, isihighlycited.com, University rankings
