Chapter 9
Characterization of Latin American
Universities in the TOP10
of the Rankings
Maritza Torres-Samuel, Carmen Vásquez, Marisabel Luna,
Nunziatina Bucci, Amelec Viloria and Jesús Vargas
Abstract Among the most recognized university rankings are the Shanghai Rank-
ing, QS World University Ranking, SCimago Institutions Rankings SIR and the Web
Ranking of Universities-Webometrics. By June 2019, there are ten Latin American
universities positioned in the Top10 of the four Rankings, despite their differentiat-
ing characteristics and established criteria. In this sense, the purpose of this paper is
to characterize these universities for a period of ten (10) years (2009–2019) based
on the data published in SIR, since it shows and registers the indicators for this
period. Among the conclusions, it stands out that these universities are distinguished
especially by their results in research, web presence, and web visibility showing
improvements in their positioning from 2009 to 2019. However, after the evaluation
of the innovation and social criteria, the ten universities coincide in declines in their
global positioning from this sub-ranking.
Keywords Universities · Latin America · Researcher · Webometrics · Ranking ·
SIR-Scimago · QS · Shanghai · Preprocessing mining data
M. Torres-Samuel (B )
Universidad Centroccidental Lisandro Alvarado, Barquisimeto, Venezuela
e-mail: mtorres@ucla.edu.ve
C. Vásquez · M. Luna · N. Bucci
Universidad Nacional Experimental Politécnica “Antonio José de Sucre”,
Barquisimeto, Venezuela
e-mail: cvasquez@unexpo.edu.co
M. Luna
e-mail: mluna@unexpo.edu.co
N. Bucci
e-mail: nbucci@unexpo.edu.co
A. Viloria · J. Vargas
Universidad de La Costa, Barranquilla, Colombia
e-mail: aviloria7@cuc.edu.co
J. Vargas
e-mail: jvargas41@cuc.edu.co
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020
V. Vijayakumar et al. (eds.), Proceedings of 6th International Conference
on Big Data and Cloud Computing Challenges, Smart Innovation, Systems
and Technologies 164, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9889-7_9
105