The Comparison of National, Regional and International Webometric Ranks of Iranian Universities and Research Centers

Many webometric studies have been done on Iranian universities, still there has not been conducted an overall research evaluating the changes in the webometric status of them over the time. The current study focuses on all Iranian universities’ and research centers’ websites and their national, regional and international webometrics ranks during 2007-2009. In a cross-sectional descriptive study, the websites of Iranian universities and research centers were retrieved via Google search engine. Then their national, regional and international webometrics ranks in webometrics.info at July 2007, January 2008, July 2008 and January 2009 were extracted and compared. The study showed that Tehran university website ranked first in the national level at the four time frames while ranked third in the region and 990th in the world in January 2009. Mashad University stood at the top of the other Iranian universities according to the overall promotion in the international webometric ranking. Iranian Information and Documentation Center (Irandoc) was the only Iranian research center among the first 1000 reported research and development centers in July 2008 and January 2009 webometric rankings of webometrics.info. In order to improve webometric ranks of Iranian universities and research centers, appropriate policies should be developed while being continuously monitored by Iranian education and research policy makers.