A proposal of rankings of Spanish universities in social networking sites

Abstract

University rankings have become popular tools to evaluate the results of academic institutions. The existing proposals of rankings of universities in Spain, based on social networking sites, show some limitations related to their lack of coverage, their specificity, and their lack of transparency in the ranking definition. The goal of this work is to introduce a general design framework for coherent classifications to analyze the impact of all Spanish universities, both public and private, in four social networking sites: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. The proposed framework is based on the definition of a criteria taxonomy, the selection of those criteria available in the four social networking sites, and the proposal of various kinds of indicators using them. To illustrate our framework, two case studies are developed evaluating the presence and influence of Spanish universities in Twitter and LinkedIn.