Welcome to the new edition of the Ranking Web of World Research Centers that has been extensively revised and updated, and now covers in depth the Chinese and Russian Academies of Sciences. That means that more than 7,000 organizations worldwide, with their own web domain or subdomain, are included in the Directory. The Top 2000 includes those institutions ranked according to their activities and visibility in the Web which is an indicator of their impact and prestige. Rank summarizes the global performance of the institutes and centers, provides information for candidate researchers, and reflects the commitment to the dissemination of scientific knowledge.

The Ranking Web is updated twice a year (January & July). The list is very comprehensive and includes not only research bodies but other institutions closely related to scientific activities that cover topics such as technology, social sciences and humanities.

A summary of the current results (July 2009) sorted by continent is presented in the following table:

	Top 100	Top 200	Top 500
USA & Canada	48	72	153
Europe	37	94	249
Asia	11	23	62
International		1	2
Oceania	2	2	9
Latin America	2	8	22
Africa			1
Arab World			2

The major change introduced in this edition relates to the way the composite index (World Ranking) is computed, as we are now combining normalized values instead of ranks. To improve the measurement of the academic impact, the visibility indicator has been build giving extra importance to the external inlinks that do not come from generic domains (.com, .org, .net).

We intend to motivate both institutions and scientists to have a web presence that reflect accurately their activities. If the web performance of an institution is below the expected position according to their academic excellence, scientific authorities should reconsider their web policy, promoting substantial increases of the volume and quality of their electronic publications

The database is still incomplete, so we will thank your cooperation providing information about organizations not listed or listed incorrectly. Please feel free to send us an EMAIL so we can add the new ones to the next updated version.