How SA universities rank globally

The latest global ranking of universities in 2023 has ranked all of South Africa's universities based on the quality, quantity, and access to their web content, using open data.

Image by jeremiahpietersen from Pixabay

Webometrics Ranking of World Universities is an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain.

The research group focused the 2022 ranking on three main indicators:

Visibility: The number of external networks (subnets) linking to the institution’s web pages ( weighted 50%)
Transparency or Openness: The number of citations from the Top 310 authors, excluding the top 30 outliers (10%)
Excellence: The number of papers amongst the top 10% most cited in each one of all 27 disciplines of the full database over the last five years (40%)

According to BusinessTech, South Africa's 123 higher learning institutes were ranked, falling between 246th and 29,531st in the world. South Africa has 26 public universities, including 12 traditional universities, six comprehensive universities, and eight universities of technology. All universities feature in the rankings.

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Here's the full ranking of South African 26 public universities:

Local #	University	Global #
1	University of Cape Town	246
2	University of the Witwatersrand	398
3	Stellenbosch University	438
4	University of Pretoria	450
5	University of KwaZulu Natal	598
6	University of Johannesburg	653
7	University of South Africa	795
8	University of the Western Cape	927
9	University of the Free State	1106
10	Rhodes University	1138
11	Cape Peninsula University of Technology	1593
12	North-West University	1668
13	Tshwane University of Technology	1717
14	Durban University of Technology	1856
15	University of Fort Hare	2339
16	University of Limpopo	2710
17	Nelson Mandela University	2715
18	University of Venda	2941
19	Vaal University of Technology	3198
20	Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University	3270
21	University of Zululand	3280
22	Central University of Technology	3570
23	Walter Sisulu University	3761
24	University of Mpumalanga	7935
25	Mangosuthu University of Technology	8262
26	Sol Plaatje University	9459