The University of Athens Ranks 1st in Southeastern Europe in the Webometrics Ranking Web of Universities

The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA) earned yet another important distinction: Released in July 2025, the results of Webometrics Ranking Web of Universities showed that NKUA placed 237th overall out of 32,000 Universities and 1st out of all 105 Greek and Cypriot Universities and other Higher Education providers included in the ranking.

As was previously mentioned, Webometrics’ Ranking Web of Universities gave the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens the top national ranking. Following that are Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (249th place worldwide) and the National Technical University of Athens (378th place worldwide). The University of Patras (524th place worldwide) and the University of Crete (573rd place worldwide) round out the national top 5. The first Cypriot University to appear in the ranking is the University of Cyprus, a public Higher Educational Institution, which holds the 619th place worldwide (see Table 1).

Table 1: The ranking of Greek and Cypriot Universities and other Higher Education providers according to Webometrics’ Ranking Web of Universities (second edition of 2025) 

Source: Webometrics’ website

The Ranking Web of Universities, which celebrates 22 years of uninterrupted presence in global University rankings, is compiled by Cybermetrics (CCHS), a research group belonging to the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), the main research foundation in Spain.

It provides information on over 32,000 Universities across 200 countries by reviewing their web presence and research impact. Universities are ranked based on criteria ranging from their online presence and visibility to the impact of their research work-as reflected in the total number of citations to papers written by their faculty and researchers-to the proportion of publications that are among the top 10% most cited and important globally.

Webometrics’ Ranking Web of Universities is regarded as one of the most authoritative global University rankings because it relies on data that can be verified directly on the Web rather than indicators that heavily depend on interviews, questionnaires, and opinion polls, which can occasionally be biased or subjective. The fundamental principle of this ranking is that it considers how crucial it is for academic Institutions to have a strong online presence in the modern world. The ranking, now in its 23rd consecutive year since 2004, is updated twice annually in January and July and is based on three criteria:

1. Visibility, 50%: The popularity of the content, i.e., the number of external networks (subnets) linking to the Institution’s web pages (which is normalized before the average value is chosen), is used to assess its quality. The popularity of the content is considered a measure of the value of an Institution, its academic performance, the value and usefulness of the information published by it, or the service it offers.

2. Transparency (or Openness), 10%: This indicator assesses the involvement of an Institution in the World Wide Web’s open science standards by counting the number of papers indexed in Google Scholar and the number of citations received by them. In practice, the analysis of citations is deemed the most accurate metric for evaluating a University’s scientific/research output. Their number, and therefore each University’s score, is calculated by adding the citations of its top 310 authors minus the top 20 outliers.

3. Excellence (or Scholar), 40%: This indicator measures the proportion of an Institution’s papers among the top 10% most cited in each of the database’s disciplines. Scopus and SCImago are the sources for this indicator, which uses data for the five years 2019-2023 in 27 distinct scientific fields.