Search results

This study aims to explore the link creating behaviour of European highly cited scientists based upon their online lists of publications and their institutional personal websites.

A total of 1,525 highly cited scientists working at European institutions were first identified. Outlinks from their online lists of publications and their personal websites pointing to a pre-defined collection of popular academic websites and file types were then gathered by a personal web crawler.

Perhaps surprisingly, a larger proportion of social scientists provided at least one outlink compared to the other disciplines investigated. By far the most linked-to file type was PDF and the most linked-to type of target website was scholarly databases, especially the Digital Object Identifier website. Health science and life science researchers mainly linked to scholarly databases, while scientists from engineering, hard sciences and social sciences linked to a wider range of target websites. Both book sites and social network sites were rarely linked to, especially the former. Hence, whilst successful researchers frequently use the Web to point to online copies of their articles, there are major disciplinary and other differences in how they do this.

This is the first study to analyse the outlinking patterns of highly cited researchers' institutional web presences in order to identify which web resources they use to provide access to their publications.

This study aims to introduce a method based on link analysis to investigate the structure of the R&D support infrastructure associated with science parks in order to determine whether this webometric approach gives plausible results.

Three science parks from Yorkshire and the Humber in the UK were analysed with webometric and social network analysis techniques. Interlinking networks were generated through the combination of two different data sets extracted from three sources (Yahoo!, Bing, SocSciBot).

These networks suggest that institutional sectors, representing business, universities and public bodies, are primarily tied together by a core formed by research institutions, support structure organisations and business developers. The comparison of the findings with traditional indicators suggests that the web‐based networks reflect the offline conditions and policy measures adopted in the region, giving some evidence that the webometric approach is plausible to investigating science park networks.

This is the first study that applies a web‐based approach to investigate to what extent the science parks facilitate a closer interaction between the heterogeneous organisations that converge in R&D networks. This indicates that link analysis may help to get a first insight into the organisation of the R&D support infrastructure provided by science parks.

Alternative document models (ADMs) were created with the purpose of reducing the extent to which anomalies occur in counts of web links at the page level, and have been used extensively within webometrics as an alternative to using the web page as the basic unit of analysis. This paper seels tp carry out a longitudinal study of ADMs in an attempt to ascertain which model gives the most consistent results when applied to the UK, Australia and New Zealand academic web spaces over the last six years.

Information science software (SocSciBot Tools, socscibot.wlv.ac.uk) was used to process hyperlink structure text files for UK, Australian and New Zealand universities and produced standard Page, Directory, Domain and Site ADMs using both inlinks and outlinks. Spearman bivariate correlation analysis was then undertaken to determine the level of correlation between these eight ADMs and a measure of site size for each university.

The findings show that the Domain ADM gives the most consistent results. However, the Directory ADM also gives more reliable results than are evident when using the standard Page model. Aggregating at the site (or university) level appears to provide less reliable results than using the page as the standard unit of measure, and this finding holds true over all three academic webs and for each time period examined over the last six years.

The use of Spearman's correlation coefficient is considered to be unreliable when used with very small sample sizes and, with only eight universities, the New Zealand academic web space may not be sufficiently large to give truly accurate statistical results.

While previous specific studies have shown that more accurate results can be obtained through the use of the Domain or Directory ADM, the paper has shown that these results are consistent over time and across different countries' academic web spaces.

Web links are a phenomenon of interest to bibliometricians by analogy with citations, and to others because of their use in Web navigation and search engines. It is known that very few links on university Web sites are targeted at scholarly expositions and yet, at least in the UK and Australia, a correlation has been established between link count metrics for universities and measures of institutional research. This paper operates on a finer‐grained level of detail, focussing on counts of links between pairs of universities. It provides evidence of an underlying linear relationship with the quadruple product of the size and research quality of both source and target institution. This simple model is proposed as applying generally to national university systems, subject to a series of constraints to identify cases where it is unlikely to be applicable. It is hoped that the model, if confirmed by studies of other countries, will open the door to deeper mining of academic Web link data.

The purpose of this paper is to claim that it is useful to assess the web connectivity of research groups, describe hyperlink‐based techniques to achieve this and present brief details of European life sciences research groups as a case study.

A commercial search engine was harnessed to deliver hyperlink data via its automatic query submission interface. A special purpose link analysis tool, LexiURL, then summarised and graphed the link data in appropriate ways.

Webometrics can provide a wide range of descriptive information about the international connectivity of research groups.

Only one field was analysed, data was taken from only one search engine, and the results were not validated.

Web connectivity seems to be particularly important for attracting overseas job applicants and to promote research achievements and capabilities, and hence we contend that it can be useful for national and international governments to use webometrics to ensure that the web is being used effectively by research groups.

This is the first paper to make a case for the value of using a range of webometric techniques to evaluate the web presences of research groups within a field, and possibly the first “applied” webometrics study produced for an external contract.