World ranking of Nepalese university

Today, while browsing the National News Agency, Nepal (RSS) web page, I find interesting information. The news is about Ranking of World Universities and Kathmandu University (KU) is among Asia’s best. It would be an honor and pride to KU family if it was true. After reading the news Click here RSS news page (Please browse the date January 13, 2008), with excitement, I checked the research organization stated in the news and I find following information.

According to www.webometrics.info, KU is ranked as 53 in ’Regional ranking of Indian subcontinent’ not of ’Asian’ universities (see report January 2008). The report lists KU at 6134th position in World ranking. The earlier report (report of July 2007) lists KU at 55 on Regional ranking of Indian subcontinent and World ranking was 5851.

Analysing the rank of KU for 2007 and 2008, the position has improved (from 55 to 53) in Indian subcontinent regional ranking but pushed back by 283 universities in World rank. At this situation, the claim of communication coordinator at KU (as stated in RSS news) is far from the reality. I assume that the information has not been analysed correctly and misinterpreted the words ’Asian’ to ’South Asian’ or ’Indian sub continent’. However, the dream of being a world class university or top among Asian universities is not impossible if KU aims and works accordingly. Otherwise, KU may face problem to acheive its goal ’to became a World class university devoted to bringing knowledge & technology to the service of mankind’.

KU may improve its rank in coming years by regular update of its webpages (programs, departments, and schools). KU may further improve its position by including all organizations (www.kusom.edu.np, www.kumj.com.np, www.kuhs.edu.np, www.kudepmusic.edu.np) with in same KU domain (www.ku.edu.np). The inter exchangeable link between KU and KU affiliated colleges, student own sites, and international affiliated organizations may influence the rank.

The CINDOC CSIC website has clearly mentioned about the aim of ranking - to promote web publication, not to rank institutions. It has further explained that the ranking is based on the support of open access initiatives, electronic access to scientific publications and to other academic material. The website has used a formula:

Webometrics Rank (position)= 4*RankV+2*RankS+1*RankR+1*RankSc

RankV is the number of unique external links to the web domain

RankS is the number of web pages recovered from major four search engines

RankR is the number of pdf, doc, ps, ppt files hosted as publication activities

RankSc is the number of papers and citations resulted from the Google Scholar database