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 Web indicators measure electronic contents, especially those used for scholarly communication, but also basic information about the hospital, its organization, services and personnel.

     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 should not be longer acceptable in the 21st century.

     The Ranking is updated twice a year (in late January and July) and now covers almost 17000 hospitals worldwide. To calculate the composite index (World Ranking) we have combined normalized values, the ranks are showed for informative purposes. The indicators used and their weighting are described below:

• The visibility is obtained from combining external inlinks and referred domains according to Majestic SEO (50%).
• Google is used for obtaning the rest of the indicators: Size, Total number of web pages, excluding the rich files (20%); Rich files, The sum of the following file types: pdf, doc, docx y ppt(15%) and Scholar: The combination of the total number of papers in Google Scholar and the recent values for the 5-year period 2007-2011 (15%).

      Some institutions have two or more different web domains (those marked with (1) on the listings) that it is a bad practice as it is confusing and penalize its performance in the search engines positioning behavior.

     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.