The University of Johannesburg (UJ) has broken into the top 500 universities in the Webometrics Ranking of World University, otherwise known as the Ranking Web of Universities. The ranking aims to promote open access to academic knowledge and improve how universities connect with society through their online presence. It focuses on three main benchmarks – visibility, transparency or openness, and excellence.

According to this year’s January 2026 edition, released on 26 January 2026, UJ has improved its global standing yet again, and is now ranked at position 491. This is a significant climb of 54 places from position 545 in January 2025. UJ is one of only five South African universities that improved in this edition. Most notably, UJ only one of the few universities in South Africa that have not declined once in this ranking, consistently climbing every year since it first appeared.

The ranking aims to promote open access to academic knowledge and improve how universities connect with society through their online presence. It focuses on three main benchmarks – visibility, transparency or openness, and excellence. The ranking cover more than 32,000  higher education institutions, including many from the Global South. As many as 124 institutions from South Africa, including 26 public universities, were evaluated in the latest rankings, giving a broad snapshot of how local campuses are performing in the digital and research space.

Webometrics blends online visibility with research performance, using data from sources such as Majestic, OpenAlex, and Scimago-Scopus. The 2026 rankings are built around three main pillars:

• Visibility (50%) – Number of external networks (links) to the university’s website
• Excellence (40%) – Research papers in the top 10% most cited across 27 disciplines
• Transparency or Openness (10%) – Citations from authors, excluding extreme outliers

Launched in 2004 and updated every six months, Webometrics is the largest academic ranking of higher education institutions, offering every six months an independent, free, open scientific exercise for providing reliable, multidimensional, updated and useful information about the performance of universities from all over the world.

Webometrics is an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain. On its website, it states that its purpose is “to provide extra motivation to researchers worldwide for publishing more and better scientific content on the Web, making it available to colleagues and people wherever they are located”.