Secretary of Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember (ITS), Dr. Suhartono, M.Sc.

ITS Campus, ITS News – Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember (ITS) once again proved its quality as one of the best tertiary institutions in Indonesia. ITS successfully maintains its position as one of the best four campuses in Indonesia according to the Webometrics Ranking Web of Universities in the period of July 2020.

Webometrics measures the progress of all tertiary institutions in the world based on the university’s website and is scheduled to be released semi-annually. The Secretary of the Institute, Dr. Suhartono, M.Sc., revealed that the ranking of ITS had a positive improvement in the last six months.

Although still ranked fourth in Indonesia, ITS world ranking advanced from 1,319 to 1,210 globally. Achievement of this high ranking is a result of successful efforts of ITS in meeting the Webometrics assessment, which consists of four indicators, namely presence, visibility, openness, and excellence.

This lecturer, who is often called Hartono, informed that there was a prominent increase in terms of the ranking in each Webometrics assessment indicator. In the aspect of excellence, ITS increased its rank from 2,025 to 1,840 worldwide. This aspect of assessment, excellence, is translated to the number of scientific publications articles of academics indexed in international journals with a high reputation from Scimago or Scopus.

Another aspect that experienced improvement is openness. This is indicated based on the number of citations from the top 210 authors in institutions sourced from Google Scholar. In this second period of Webometrics 2020, ITS achieved the rank of 1,230 from 1,479 in terms of openness.

“From both aspects of openness and excellence, it can be deduced that the quality of the publications of ITS lecturers in Scopus and Google Scholar Citation is definitely improving, which caused the advancement of the number of citations and ITS’ ranking itself,” clarified this lecturer of the ITS Statistics Department.

Nevertheless, Hartono did not deny the decline in our ranking in the other two indicators. He identified that the presence and visibility ranking of ITS did not improve from the previous assessment period. “The presence rating dropped from 711 to 773, while the visibility rating downgraded from 1,205 to 1,244,” he conveyed.

In response to this matter, Hartono intended to focus on the two aspects that experienced a decline. He explained that the Secretary of the Institute (SEKITS), together with the Public Communication Unit (UKP) and the Directorate of Technology Development and Information Systems of ITS, can be expected to immediately make improvements in the two indicators.

In his statement, Hartono elaborated that it was necessary to identify related indicators in the evaluation of Webometrics. This is in order to give the appropriate actions according to the prioritized indicators that need to be matched with the implementation and evaluation schedule until the next assessment period. “Several steps will be taken immediately and it is expected that there will be a significant improvement in ranking, especially in the presence and impact indicators, in the assessment results at the beginning of 2021,” he emphasized.

Hartono mentioned that the aspects of impact and presence can be controlled because there is an internal role of the institution. The impact aspect became the most expected aspect to increase significantly, in relation to the number of external networks (subnets) connected to the institution’s web pages.

As for indicators on openness and excellence, Hartono hoped for lecturers to continue in actively collaborating and synergizing with other academics both locally and globally. He wished that these consistent actions will contribute to the improvement of ITS ranking.

“Our immediate step is to keep the synergy and collaboration between DPTSI – SEKITS – UKP that will be carried out periodically and systematically so that during the assessment period of January 2021 onwards, there will be an advancement in ITS ranking, especially in the mentioned indicators,” he concluded. (dya/ory/ITS Public Relations)