According to the “Webometrics Ranking of World University,” announced by Spanish National Research Council this July, TKU has been ranked as No. 351 in the world, No. 38 in Asia, No. 10 in Taiwan, and No. 1 in private universities of Taiwan, which is the best achievement during the recent three years. President C.I. Chang remarked that comparing to the evaluation done in January this year, TKU has made a great progress in all indicators, and she thanked for the hard working of all units. However, there are still some parts that are not good enough, so President Chang hopes that all TKU members could take the problems seriously, and then try to improve them.
“Webometrics Ranking of World University,” one of the three most influencing ranking systems of world universities, is published twice a year. Apart from evaluating teaching faculty and journal paper publication, the other four indicators are Web Size, Visibility, Rich Files, and Scholar, that is, the number of papers and citations in Google Scholar.
Comparing the results in January and July this year, TKU improves the most in the indicator of “web size,” ranked from No. 461 to 184, surpassing some national universities like National Sun Yat-Sen University and National Cheng Kung University. It has also improved 200 places, ranked as No. 363 in “Visibility”, and 127 places, ranked as No. 423 in “Google Scholar”, better than National Chengchi University and National Taiwan Normal University. As for the indicator “Rich Files,” TKU has improved 100 places, ranked as No. 706. Yet paralleling with I-Shou University, ranked as No. 356, we still have a lot of space for improvement.
President Chang pointed out that other schools’ good performance in the indicator of “Rich Files” indicated that we needed to improve this domain. She said that the related units should understand what the problems are, and correct them all along the line to keep TKU in the best condition. Moreover, although our ranking in the world has made a great progress than that of the last year, the ranking in Taiwan is still at a standstill. Hence, all TKU staff has to keep working, making use of our advantage of information-oriented education to improve it.
Dr. Chen Kan-nan, Vice President for Academic Affairs, expressed that TKU’s improvement in the “Webometrics Ranking of World University” is a praise and appreciation to our hard working for long time. It also proves that school authority’s encouragement to raise the atmosphere of academic research has gradually reached a concrete achievement.
In the 2009 academic year, the awarding policy for paper presenting and publishing will focus on both quality and quantity. As for the newly recruited teachers, besides the awarding policy of “Key Research Projects,” the “Eight Year Promotion Deadline Regulation” also pushes the assistant professors to do the research and get promotion as soon as possible. Teacher evaluation, the number of research projects and the result presentation are also listed in the indicators of evaluation. Through these ways, it is hoped that TKU’s academic prestige can be raised.
Dr. Hwang Ming-dar, Director of Information Processing Center, indicated that in order to improve the ranking in “Webometrics Ranking of World University,” Information Processing Center will promote the standardized design of website, adopting the standards of Dublin Core to mark the titles of the web page and update the content of English website regularly. He also suggested all TKU students and teachers to upload their academic papers and research results to share teaching resources. Consequently, it will be more convenient for scholars to cite the papers and hence the number of browse could be raised. In addition, the Center is going to hold the web page contest for the first and second level administrative units, encouraging them to enrich the content of the website and helping the site manager to improve their abilities of using software. As a result, the visibility of the website can also be increased. ( ~Shu-chun Yen )
