The Cybermetrics Lab is publishing this Webometrics Ranking of World Hospitals from a purely academic point of view and as such it should be used. The Web indicators applied does not measure at all the quality of patient's treatment and health care offered by the hospitals included. So please be aware that if you are looking for the best place to treat a health condition this ranking is not appropriated for such a search.

The Ranking Web of World Hospitals is introduced as a tool for showing the commitment of health organizations to the electronic publication and dissemination of academic information related to medicine. The Top Hospitals should be prone to share their information not only with other colleagues (physicians, researchers, scholars) but also with the rest of society, patients, community leaders, managers and citizens in general.

The Web indicators measure electronic contents, especially those used for scholarly communication, but also basic information about the hospital, its organization, services and personnel. The rank takes into account both the volume of information published and the impact or visibility of such contents measured by the number of external links the web pages receive from others.

Surprisingly, many hospitals, even in the developed countries, have a poor presence in the Web or no presence at all. This lack of valuable contents publicly available is really very concerning and it is no longer acceptable in the 21st century. Some institutions have two or more different web domains (those marked with and asterisk (*) on the listings) that it is a bad practice as it is confusing and penalize its performance in the search engines positioning behavior. The Hospital of Rouen is marked with a (**) because the data corresponding to the CISMEF website has been eliminated.

The Ranking is updated twice a year (in January and July) and now there is almost 18000 hospitals worldwide. To calculate the composite index (World Ranking) we have combined normalized values instead of ranks to improve the measurement of the academic impact.

Please, help us to improve the Ranking providing comments, suggestions or criticisms, but specially checking the name and URL addresses of the websites, informing us of new, disappeared or incorrect entries.

As usual we will thank your comments if you address them to our MAILBOX.