Ranking the top 26 universities in South Africa

Webometrics has published its mid-year update to the global ranking of universities in 2023, with the University of Cape Town, yet again, coming out on top.

The rankings – created by Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, the largest public research body in Spain – are based on the quality, quantity and access to web content from a University.

“The original aim of the Ranking was to promote Web publication. Supporting Open Access initiatives, electronic access to scientific publications and to other academic material are our primary targets,” Webometrics said.

“However, web indicators are very useful for ranking purposes too as they are not based on number of visits or page design but on the global performance and visibility of the universities.”

“As other rankings focused only on a few relevant aspects, especially research results, web indicators based ranking reflects better the whole picture, as many other activities of professors and researchers are showed by their web presence.”

Crucially, the ranking is not only based on the websites of the universities but also their webometric (all missions) and bibliometric (research mission) indicators.

Webometrics said that the rankings are mainly based on three core indicators.

• Visibility: The number of external networks (subnets) linking to the institution’s web pages ( weighted 50%)

• Transparency or Openness: The number of citations from the Top 310 authors, excluding the top 30 outliers (10%)

• Excellence: The number of papers amongst the top 10% most cited in each one of all 27 disciplines of the full database over the last five years (40%)

However, it did stress that there are some issues with its data collection process.

For instance, as the ranking is strongly linked to the volume and quality of the content published on the web, the researchers have noted that there are many universities that use unethical practices to manipulate their ranking.

In addition, bad naming practices by universities and sharing top-level domains can hurt a university in the rankings.

As the data collection is based on all the higher learning institutions – including smaller colleges and institutes – there are over 31,000 institutions from 200 countries included. We have thus decided to only look at South Africa’s 26 recognised universities.

Looking at the local rankings, the University of Cape Town comes out tops – ranking 237th in the world, an improvement from the placement of 247th at the start of the year.

The University of Witwatersrand is second, with a global ranking of 392, up from 398th.

The University of Pretoria and Steelnbosch University also feature in the top 500 universities in the world at 437 and 441, respectively (up from 438th and 450th).

Overall, eight universities feature in the top 1,000 across the world.

On the other end of the scale, Sol Plaatjie University is the lowest-ranked South African University, with a global ranking of 7,889. However, this is a noticeable improvement from the ranking of 9459 earlier this year.

Below are the rankings of South Africa’s 26 universities:

Read: New ranking of the top universities in South Africa working to make the world a better place