  Most currently available schemes for performance based ranking of
Universities or Research organizations, such as, Quacarelli Symonds (QS), Times
Higher Education (THE), Shanghai University based All Research of World
Universities (ARWU) use a variety of criteria that include productivity,
citations, awards, reputation, etc., while Leiden and Scimago use only
bibliometric indicators. The research performance evaluation in the aforesaid
cases is based on bibliometric data from Web of Science or Scopus, which are
commercially available priced databases. The coverage includes peer reviewed
journals and conference proceedings. Google Scholar (GS) on the other hand,
provides a free and open alternative to obtaining citations of papers available
on the net, (though it is not clear exactly which journals are covered.)
Citations are collected automatically from the net and also added to self
created individual author profiles under Google Scholar Citations (GSC). This
data was used by Webometrics Lab, Spain to create a ranked list of 4000+
institutions in 2016, based on citations from only the top 10 individual GSC
profiles in each organization. (GSC excludes the top paper for reasons
explained in the text; the simple selection procedure makes the ranked list
size-independent as claimed by the Cybermetrics Lab). Using this data
(Transparent Ranking TR, 2016), we find the regional and country wise
distribution of GS-TR Citations. The size independent ranked list is subdivided
into deciles of 400 institutions each and the number of institutions and
citations of each country obtained for each decile. We test for correlation
between institutional ranks between GS TR and the other ranking schemes for the
top 20 institutions.
