Web Based Reputation Index of Turkish Universities

reputation index of Turkish universities through their online impact and effectiveness. Using 16 different web based parameters and employing normalization process of the results, we have ranked websites of Turkish universities in terms of their web presence. This index is first attempt to determine the tools of reputation of Turkish academic websites and would be a basis for further studies to examine the relation between reputation and the online effectiveness of the universities. Websites have become main venues for reputation and presence of universities. Indeed, a web site of a university is vital medium for promoting the universities core competencies. It is an indicator of how this institution is perceived by its internal and external customers, reflecting not only its academic performance, but also its administrative services. Thus, the Internet and dissemination of information is forcing universities to have more visible and effective web presence. Along with the global interest in university rankings, impact and effectiveness of university web sites have become subject to numerous studies and projects. One of them is the project utilized by the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). This Project is called " The Webometrics Ranking of World Universities " based on university web presence, visibility and web access. As it is stated in the project's web site, " the objective is not to evaluate websites, their design or usability or the popularity of their contents according to the number of visits or visitors. " The ranking's first edition was published in 2004. Since 2006, it appears twice per year [1]. Using web mining techniques such as data extracted from search and counting number of inlinks, it is possible to generate new ranking methods. This paper is an attempt to do so by employing a bunch of indicators to measure the impact of academic web sites. In this paper, we have tried to create a reputation index by the web indicators like Google page rank, number of visitors, number of pages linking back to the web page or the number of likes on Facebook. We have collected 16 different web indicator data and normalized the collected numbers using min-max normalization. After normalizing all the collected data, we have got an index value for all of the universities via arithmetic mean. Finally the university index values are normalized via the number of students attending to the university, because the web …