Yogyakarta. Gadjah Mada University was named the seventh-best institute of higher learning in Southeast Asia last month in terms of its Web presence, up from eighth place last year. The rankings, published every January and July by Webometrics, are an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group affiliated with Spain’s High Council of Scientific Investigation. The rankings are based on each institution’s Web presence, including the number of files recoverable using four search engines, and the results of searches for the publication of academic and research papers. Suryo Baskoro, head of public relations for Gadjah Mada, better known as UGM, said the new ranking marked an improvement from last year for the country’s oldest university. The school is ranked 69th in Asia and 593rd worldwide. “UGM has once again shown it is the best university in Indonesia, after claiming the honor [of topping the Webometrics rankings for Indonesia] for the past three years,” Suryo said. He attributed the school’s higher ranking than other Indonesian universities to its extensive use of information technology. One of the four criteria for the Webometrics rankings is “size,” or the number of pages recovered from the university’s domain using the four search engines Google, Yahoo, Live Search and Exalead. Another criteria is “visibility,” which calculates the number of unique external links from the domain. The last two criteria are “rich files,” the number of relevant academic resources available from the university in the form of certain file formats, and “scholar,” the number of papers and citations for each academic domain as provided by Google Scholar. Suryo said that from these criteria, it was evident that the wealth of academic information available from Gadjah Mada’s domain, ugm.ac.id, was the most comprehensive in the country. “We’re grateful for the recognition, but it’s not our ultimate aim,” he said. “Everything we do to improve campus life is part of our aim to serve the people.” Topping the Webometrics list for Southeast Asia this January was the National University of Singapore. The only other Indonesian university in the top 10 was the University of Indonesia, which came in eighth. On Wednesday, UGM rector Sudjarwadi said Asia was gradually taking over from Europe and North America as a global center for academics and science. “At least five countries here are now vying to be world capitals of learning: China, India, South Korea, Japan and Indonesia,” he said. “In the 19th century that seat was held by Europe, then moved to North America in the 20th century. The 21st century will see it move again, this time to Asia.” Sudjarwadi said that while Indonesia’s academic system was not as advanced the ones in East Asia, the country had an advantage in the form of its wealth of natural resources. “Research by our graduates into exploiting these resources holds extraordinary potential to turn Indonesia into a global hub for scientific and cultural knowledge,” he said. “That’s why we need our graduates to be at the forefront of sculpting a more science-oriented society.” Sudjarwadi added that one of the main obstacles to nurturing a culture of learning was the fact that very few of the country’s youths went on to university, largely because of prohibitive costs. News Sources : The Jakarta Globe, Antara Photo Source : ugm.ac.id
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