Webometric analysis of Iranian medical universities according to visibility, size and rich files

The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of a webometric analysis of web sites of medical universities of Iran. This study was conducted in Sept 2012 using Majestic SEO, Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines. The number of web pages, external inlinks, rich files and the total rank for 43 universities with active exclusive web sites were calculated. Findings indicated that Tehran University Medical Sciences with 220453 web pages, 887545 external inlinks, and 14495 rich files ranked as the first and Jiroft University of Medical Sciences had the lowest rank in the study. Findings indicated a significant relationship between the Webometric rank and the university rank in Iranian Ministry of Health. This study indicated that the use of rich files can give a better and more reliable view of university rankings. There are few studies