Spain’s research council has released the first of its two 2019 rankings of 11 995 universities, which is based on on a bunch of fairly standard indicators, but as measured by www presence and visibility.

Critics claim this is no measure of merit at all, supporters suggest it is no worse than asking people which universities they rate. As the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas argues, “ if the web performance of an institution is below the expected position according to their academic excellence, university authorities should reconsider their web policy, promoting substantial increases of the volume and quality of their electronic publications.”

Whatever, the CSIC’ results are generally in-line with other rankings, at least for top performing institutions. This year the world top 50 is just about all from the anglo-sphere, the same as just about every year.

The first uni from outside North America and the UK is Tsinghua U at 42nd. The first ANZ institution in the global top 300  is – who would have thought?- the University of Melbourne, at 55 (60 in last August’s edition), followed by UNSW at 63, UofQ at 66, UniSydney at 72, ANU at 77. Monash U at 88 rounds out the locals in the global top 100.

Uni Adelaide is first in the second century (126), followed by UWA (149) and Uni Auckland at 153. The next ANZ entrant is Curtin U, at 248, followed by QUT  at 259, Macquarie U at 262, UniWollogong at 284, UTS and Griffith U (=294), and RMIT in 299th place.