This indicator is used in three of our QS University Rankings by Region. The Webometrics Ranking Web of World Universities looks at the impact of an institution's online footprint.
Due to the automated nature of the approach, the ranking embraces some 20,000 institutions worldwide – the most extensive comparative evaluation of world universities.
At a global level the Webometrics system is probably overly generous to institutions who operate principally in English – only a few institutions in the top 50 do otherwise – but at a regional level – particularly in a region where no one country has an innate advantage in English it makes for a compelling comparator. Here we have eliminated the Excellence (Scholar) component of the Webometrics methodology due to its overlap with our Scopus analysis and scaled the other factors up to compensate (currently Openness is weighted at half of Visibility) – forging this together to form a 5% indicator.