“Nicolae Testemitanu” State University of Medicine and Pharmacy of the Republic of Moldova maintains its first position at the national level in Webometrics Ranking

Nicolae Testemitanu State University of Medicine and Pharmacy of the Republic of Moldova maintains its first place at the national level and has climbed 41 positions worldwide in the Ranking Web of Universities (Webometrics), as compared to the January 2023 edition. According to the Webometrics Report published at the end of July this year, our university ranks 263rd among universities in Central and Eastern Europe, 1120th among those on the European continent and 3647th among the more than 32 thousand institutions present online at the global level.

Nicolae Testemitanu State University of Medicine and Pharmacy of the Republic of Moldova is the national leader in the international Transparency ranking according to the number of citations in the most representative Google Scholar profiles. Thus, our university obtained 38,953 citations, 11,340 more than in the previous edition (January 2023 – 27,613 citations).

Also, as regards the Excellence indicator, the University ranks first in the country and has advanced by 95 positions worldwide. At the same time, in the last six months, Nicolae Testemitanu University advanced by 453 positions worldwide with respect to Impact (Visibility) indicator.

Rector Emil Ceban congratulated the university community on this achievement, emphasizing the fact that maintaining the institution's national leadership position is due to the awareness of the mission and the consolidation of the vision regarding open science and integration into the global research space, by joint efforts and personal contribution of each researcher-employee or beneficiary of studies.

Established in 2004 by the Cybermetrics Lab from Spain (Spanish National Research Council, CSIC), Webometrics is a classification system for universities around the world, which aims to motivate both institutions and researchers to have a web presence that accurately reflects their activities. The main objective of the Webometrics ranking is to promote Open Access to university-generated knowledge. The best strategy to improve your ranking is to increase the quantity and quality of your web content.

Ranking Web of Universities is published twice a year and analyzes over 32 thousand higher education institutions in the world, according to three indicators:

50% – Impact (Visibility) – the total number of external links that the institution's web domain receives from third parties (Ahrefs Majestic);

10% – Transparency (Openness) – the total number of citations of university researchers that are found in the top of the 310 authors' profiles, excluding the first 20 profiles (Google Scholar Profiles);

40% – Excellence – the quality of scientific articles published in international journals with a high impact factor, in the top 10% most cited in 27 disciplines, according to 2018-2022 data (Scimago).

 In the current edition, the organizers have also come up with some recommendations regarding author profiles on Google Scholar, namely:

 1. The need to indicate the official name of the university upon affiliation and the institutionally personalized email address of the author/authors.

 2. The creation of a personal profile in Google Scholar is voluntary, but once it is made public, the responsibility for the correctness of the information belongs to the author. GSC automatically updates the profiles of authors which sometimes automatically add records and citations that do not belong to them. Authors should be aware of this and review their profiles periodically. Institutions should also monitor their community member profiles to exclude intentional (or unintentional) false, inaccurate, or duplicate entries. This is key to the ranking, as any institution identified with such non-conformities may be excluded from future editions of the ranking.

 3. A few universities have been identified as having two main web domains, but only the top overall ranking is included in the main ranking.

 4. Non-individual profiles (journals, departments, groups, conferences) are penalized up to the exclusion of the entire institution (the number of citations is equal to zero).

 5. Bad practices. If multiple author profiles not belonging to the university are intentionally added to increase its rating, the institution will be excluded from the ranking. Over 1,400,000 Google Scholar profiles were analyzed in the current edition.

 Data for the Webometrics International Ranking is collected in the first weeks of January and July, covering more than 32,000 higher education institutions worldwide.