
For 20 years, the Spanish group Cybermetrics Lab prepares a ranking of universities at world level, based on the volume of their content on the Internet, but the visibility and impact of the works of these universities, based mainly on their citations in the works of other researchers ( Webometrics Ranking of World Universities).
The Cybermetrics Lab is a research group belonging to the Higher Council of Scientific Research, the most important public body of scientific research in Spain. The last publication of this ranking, from January 2023, shows that Albanian universities are far from the high levels of the ranking.
The ranking has three main indicators, that of influence, which tries to measure the number of external links connected to the university's websites; excellence, which measures the number of scientific works that are part of the first group (of 10%) cited in the works of other authors; openness (transparency), which tends to give the participation of university researchers to the group of most cited researchers.
From the above, the ranking is not based on a direct analysis of scientific research parameters, but indirectly gives indications regarding the volume of academic and scientific works of universities, as well as the fact that this information is accessed and cited by researchers. or other stakeholders.
The University of Tirana ranks first among Albanian universities, ranked 3972 in the world, followed by the Agricultural University of Tirana, ranked 4379 in the world.
Among the private universities, the first is the "Epoka" University, which is the third in Albania and the 4568th place in the world.
Next, the "Ismail Qemali" University of Vlora, the Polytechnic University of Tirana, the "Our Lady of the Good Council" Catholic University, the "Aleksandër Moisiu" University of Durrës, the European University of Tirana, the University of Medicine in Tirana and the "Aleksandër Xhuvani" University of Elbasan follow. .
Albania's position is not very good even compared to the neighboring countries of the region. Among the five neighboring countries of the Western Balkans (Kosovo, North Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina), there are 14 universities that have a higher ranking than the first Albanian university (University of Tirana). The first university in the region is ranked the University of Belgrade, in the 443rd place in the world, followed by the University of Novi Sad, in the 963rd place, the University of Nis, in the 1487th place. Among the universities with a better position than the University of Tirana, the University of Pristina is also ranked, in the 2982nd place in the world.
At the world level, the ranking is dominated by American universities. Of the top ten universities in the ranking, nine of them are located in the USA. The ranking is headed by Harvard University, followed by Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The first European university in the ranking is Oxford, in Great Britain, which is in the fifth place in the world, followed by the University of Cambridge, in the twelfth place.