Rankings of countries based on rankings of universities

Abstract: Although many methods have been designed for ranking universities, there is no suitable system that focuses on the ranking of countries based on the performance of their universities. The overall ranking of the universities in a region can indicate the growth of interests in science among the people of that land. This paper introduces a novel ranking mechanism based on the rankings of universities. Firstly, we introduce and discuss two new rankings of countries, based on the rank of their universities. Secondly, we create rankings of countries according to the selected method, based on the top 12000 universities in webometrics.info (January 2012) and compare rankings of countries in 4 editions (January 2012 to July 2013). Firstly, we introduce two new methods of ranking countries based on their university rankings, Weighted Ranking (WR) and Average Ranking (AR). Secondly, we discuss how the introduced ranking systems, perform in ranking countries based on the two years of data. Thirdly, we choose QS (http://www.topuniversities.com) and webometrics.info as two different classification systems for comparing rankings of countries, based on the top 500 universities in these rankings. Results indicate that the methodology can be used to show the quality of the whole universities of each country used to compare rankings of countries in practice compare to other countries in the world.