According to the Webometrics’ Ranking Web of World Universities, Tamkang University is among the best 300 universities in the world. In Webometrics’ bi-annual assessment of over 20,000 universities worldwide, Tamkang placed 285th, which represents a mammoth improvement from its 567th placing last year. Its placing puts Tamkang first among all private universities in Taiwan. The Webometrics’ Ranking Web of World Universities assesses universities around the world for criteria such as internet presence visibility, amount of published scholarly (rich) files, and number of references to published scholarly articles in Google Scholar. This year, in each of the categories listed above, Tamkang performed better than in previous years.

Tamkang University was ranked 32nd in Asia and 10th in Taiwan. Statistics show that TKU has been ranked 10th in Taiwan for several years now, which suggests that while Tamkang is improving, so are the other top ten Taiwanese universities.

So how can Tamkang wrestle its way up the rankings?

The TKU Vice President for Academic Affairs, Dr. Gwo-hsin Yu, said that this would require a concerted effort from the entire body of TKU faculty and staff. He suggested several practical methods for further improving TKU’s overall ranking: more efficient production of online data and information, and a review of how much online information each academic department actually provides. “If we can strengthen our performance in these areas, our ranking will naturally improve”, he added.

To this end, the Director of the TKU Information Processing Center, Dr. Ming-Dar Hwang, has designed and implemented a number of concrete initiatives. These include a web design competition held between administrative and academic departments, which would spur each department to come up with a more modern and innovative website. This improved website would then be incorporated as a standard template web page, which each department would use to enter their respective online data. This would add to the stability and security of TKU’s online maintenance work, and project a more consistent and professional image.