„Nicolae Testemitanu” State University of Medicine and Pharmacy ranks the first place at the national level by the number of citations in Google Scholar

Nicolae Testemitanu State University of Medicine and Pharmacy of the Republic of Moldova registers a 4-fold increase in the number of citations in Google Scholar, from 5,457 (in January 2021) to 20,651 citations (in January 2022), thus rising to the first position nationally. The data were published on January 27 on the official website of the Webometrics international ranking "Transparent Ranking: Top Universities by Citations in Top Google Scholar profiles" (https://www.webometrics.info/en/transparent). 

According to rector Emil Ceban, these data represent a remarkable achievement of the University in the research and innovation area, a fact that confirms the quality and excellence of the scientific staff of Nicolae Testemitanu University. During the first meeting of the Senate this year, which took place on January 27, the rector thanked the entire university community for the effort, responsibility, and commitment to promoting and developing of medical and pharmaceutical sciences. In this context, Professor Ceban highlighted the contribution of the staff of the University’s Health Sciences Library, who during the pandemic focused on the development of electronic products and mobilized members of the university community to place as many documents as possible in the Institutional Repository and to enhance the scientific visibility. Furthermore, the rector once again urged the teaching staff, doctoral students, researchers, etc. to create Google Scholar accounts with a view to increasing scientific performance indicators. 

The current edition of the Webometrics "Transparent Ranking" evaluates over 5000 educational institutions of the world, listing the top 3800 universities that have more than 1000 citations in Google Scholar. Only four universities from our country are presented in the ranking: Nicolae Testemitanu University with 20,651 citations, the Technical University of Moldova with 16,481 citations, the State University of Moldova with 14,247 citations and Alecu Russo State University from Balti with 1,829 citations. 

The Transparent Ranking organizers explain the methodology for identifying the top institutions by the number of citations in Google Scholar, mentioning some methodological changes and relevant recommendations: Indicate the official name of the university and the institutional email address. 

- Citations from the first 210 public profiles of each university are collected. This number of profiles allows comparisons regardless of size. The first twenty (20) profiles in the list per institution are excluded to improve representativeness, thus eliminating outliers. For the rest of the top profiles, the number of citations is added, and the institutions are ranked in descending order of this indicator. 

- Important: Non-individual profiles (journals, departments, groups, conferences) included in the first 210 profiles are penalized by excluding the entire institution, the number of citations being equal to zero. 

- Wrong practices. If several author profiles do not belong to the University, but are intentionally added to increase its position, the institution will be excluded from the ranking. The data is compiled from over 1,040,000 GSC profiles, some of which are incorrect (unedited, incomplete or erroneous), but it is almost impossible to verify all of them. 

- The figures are only valid at the time of collection (between January 10-20). We do not comment on numbers or absences. This version consists only of top records (citations >1000), about 4,800 institutions, but we will use non-zero values ​​for about 3,000 additional institutions. 

- A few universities have two main web domains, but only the top global site is included in the main ranking. 

Creating a personal profile in Google Scholar is voluntary, but once it is made public, responsibility for the accuracy of the information provided rests with the author. GSC automatically updates profiles. Although it is very practical, sometimes it inappropriately adds records and quotes to the profile. Authors should be aware of these issues and review their profiles periodically. Institutions should also monitor their member profiles for false, incorrect or intentionally (or unintentionally) duplicate records. This is critical to the ranking, as any institution with these issues may be excluded from future editions of the ranking.