Webometric Ranking and Nigerian Private Universities : A

The Case study research method was adopted to evaluate the possible chances of Bells University of Technology, Ota, Nigeria, in Cybermetric Research Group’s webometric ranking. Observation, questionnaire and webometric analysis using Google Search Engine was adopted as methods of data collection. The sampled academics comprised those that had spent at least six months as academic staff of the University. Therefore, 30 academics comprised the sample population. Only 4 of them had disengaged while 26 are still in the services of the University. It was, however discovered that the University’s academic staff composition was made up of mostly young academic staff. It was also revealed that the University’s website domain name needs to be assessed and changed to suit the required domain name for universities. It was observed that the University’s Internet facilities were very reliable, and that research and publication activities in the University were encouraging. A good number of the respondents own PCs and Laptops and were also aware of the importance of the web to research, and as such make significant use of the web for their research and publications. The article concludes that the University possess high prospect of ranking top in webometric ranking in the future. Introduction The World Wide Web has rapidly become global machinery for the propagation of academic findings as well as a very reliable tool for communication among scholars. It has changed the face of major academic disciplines and the way they report their research findings. The increase in the use of the web for research has led to the evolution of web bibliometric, popularly referred to as webometric. Webometric evolved because of the impact of the web to scholarship. It has become a challenge to Nigerian universities, especially the newly evolving private universities, as they must face the challenges of adopting the web and related technologies for academic activities in a meaningful and systematic manner. Since webometric seeks to categorize universities to those that have meaningfully adopted the web for research, teaching and learning and those that have not, research into it has become imperative. Background In the recent past, university education in Nigeria has been given a face lift. The expansion of the university education sector in Nigeria in 1999 to accommodate private owners is a very good example of recent improvement in the sector. Consequently, IT and Internet acquisition and use have been continuously supported by government and initiated and implemented by stakeholders. As a result, Nigerian universities have