webometric ranking of top iranian medical universities

normal 0 false false false en-us x-none ar-sa microsoftinternetexplorer4 introduction: some of the most frequently used webometric indicators for evaluating and ranking academic web sites are web impact factor, number of web pages and number of inlinks. the present study evaluated and ranked top iranian medical universities according to the webometric indicators. methods: the present cross-sectional study has been done on top iranian medical universities. the number of web pages, inlinks and external inlinks were identified using altavista search engine. then their overall and absolute web impact factors were calculated. finally, the universities were compared and ranked according to the size, inlinks, external inlinks and also the overall and absolute web impact factors. results: the results showed that tehran university of medical sciences ranked first according to the size and inlinks while ranked last according to the overall and absolute web impact factors. ahwaz university of medical sciences got the highest position according to the overall and absolute web impact factors compared with the other universities. conclusion: the study revealed that even top iranian medical universities have not wide presence over the web and are not internationally well known. having few english web pages and short web history are the major reasons for iranian universities poor presence on the web.