Vietnam has eight universities in South East Asia’s top 100 universities according to the latest report from Webometrics, however, many of them have dropped in the rankings.

Top 10 Vietnamese universities

In the ranking for the second quarter announced on July 29, Vietnam National University in Hanoi, Can Tho University and Hanoi University of Science and Technology led the pack of Vietnamese universities. However, compared to the first quarter, most universities fell in the rankings.

Vietnam National University in Hanoi's ranking dropped from 26th to 29th. Can Tho University sat in the 39th place in the first ranking but dropped to 53rd.

Hanoi University of Science and Technology became Vietnam’s second-best university despite its regional ranking drop from 47th to 49th.

Even though many universities dropped in their ranking, there are also new universities appeared such as Hanoi University of Agriculture that sat in the 69th and Hanoi University of Mining and Geology in the 83th.

Vietnam National University in HCM City, Danang University and Thai Nguyen University managed to stay in the regional ranking but their positions fell by 21 to 30 places.

Tra Vinh University's ranking has the sharpest plunge from 100th to 163th.

Pham Hung Hiep, post-graduate student at Chinese Culture University in Taiwan, said Vietnamese ranking dropped because Webometrics had changed its calculating method.

This is the first time Webometrics used statistics from Google Scholar that stores theses or scholarly literature from various publishing formats and disciplines.

This evaluation accounts for 10% of overall score. The last three indicators include academic excellence, presence and impact.

Hiep said this was a good change that would reveal more about teaching quality and research. "If a mere administrative document could previously score some points, now the universities would need proper scientific research," Hiep said.

He went on to say that many Vietnamese universities hadn't used Google Scholar and this was one of the reasons for the drop in rankings.

Webometrics Ranking is first created by the Cybermetrics Lab, a unit of the Spanish National Research Council in 2004 to improve the presence of academic and research facilities on internet.

Dtinews