Selective linking from social platforms to university websites: a case study of the Spanish academic system

Mention indicators have frequently been used in Webometric studies because they provide a powerful tool for determining the degree of visibility and impact of web resources. Among mention indicators, hypertextual links were a central part of many studies until Yahoo! discontinued the ¿linkdomain¿ command in 2011. Selective links constitute a variant of external links where both the source and target of the link can be selected. This paper intends to study the influence of social platforms (measured through the number of selective external links) on academic environments, in order to ascertain both the percentage that they constitute and whether some of them can be used as substitutes of total external links. For this purpose, 141 URLs belonging to 76 Spanish universities were compiled in 2010 (before Yahoo! stopped their link services), and the number of links from 13 selected social platforms to these universities were calculated. Results confirm a good correlation between total external links and links that come from social platforms, with the exception of some applications (such as Digg and Technorati). For those universities with a higher number of total external links, the high correlation is only maintained on Delicious and Wikipedia, which can be utilized as substitutes of total external links in the context analyzed. Notwithstanding, the global percentage of links from social platforms constitute only a small fraction of total links, although a positive trend is detected, especially in services such as Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook.Orduña Malea, E.; Ontalba Ruipérez, JA. (2013). Selective linking from social platforms to university websites: a case study of the Spanish academic system. Scientometrics. 95(2):593-614. doi:10.1007/s11192-012-0851-1S593614952Aguillo, I. F. (2009a). Measuring the institutions’ footprint in the web. Library Hi Tech, 27(4), 540–556.Aguillo, IF. (2009b). Cibermetría: introducción teórico-práctica. Version 1.56 (unpublished teaching material).Alonso Berrocal, J. L., Figuerola, C. G., & Zazo, A. F. (2004). Cibermetria: nuevas tecnicas de estudio aplicables al Web. Gijon: Trea.Bar-Ilan, J. (2003). A microscopic link analysis of academic institutions within a country—the case of Israel. Scientometrics, 59(3), 391–403.Bar-Ilan, J. (2005). What do we know about links and linking? A framework for studying links in academic environments. Information Processing & Management, 41(4), 973–986.Baron, L., Tague-Sutcliffe, J., & Kinnucan, M. T. (1996). Labeled, typed links as cues when reading hypertext documents. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 47(12), 896–908.Bjorneborn, L., & Ingwersen, P. (2004). Toward a basic framework for webometrics. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55(14), 1216–1227.Cabezas-Clavijo, A., & Torres-Salinas, D. (2012). Google scholar citations y la emergencia de nuevos actores en la evaluación de la investigación. Anuario Thinkepi, 6, 147–153.Cronin, B., Snyder, H., Rosenbaum, H., Martinson, A., & Callahan, E. (1998). Invoked on the Web. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 49(14), 1319–1328.Dhyani, D., Keong Ng, W., &, SS Bhowmick (2002) A survey of Web Metrics. ACM Computing Surveys, 34(4), 469–503.Eysenbach, G. (2012). Can Tweets predict citations? Metrics of social impact based on Twitter and correlation with traditional metrics of scientific impact. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 13(4).Faba-Perez, C., Bote, Guerrero, Vicente, P., & Moya-Anegon, F. (2004). Fundamentos y técnicas cibermétricas. Mérida: Junta de Extremadura.Garcia-Santiago, M. D. (2001). Topología de la información en la World Wide Web: modelo experimental y bibliométrico en una red hipertextual nacional. Granada: Universidad, Departamento de Biblioteconomía y Documentación.Gibson, D., Kleinberg, J. & Raghavan, P. (1998a). Inferring web communities from link topology. In: Proceedings of the 9th ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia (pp. 225–234). http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/ht98.pdf . Accessed 4 June 2012.Gibson, D., Kleinberg, J. & Raghavan, P. (1998b). Structural analysis of the World Wide Web. In: World Wide Web Consortium Workshop on Web Characterization. Position paper. http://www.w3.org/1998/11/05/wc-workshop/Papers/kleinber1.html . Accessed 4 June 2012.Haas, S. W., & Grams, E. S. (1998). A link taxonomy of Web pages. Proceedings of the 61st ASIS annual meeting (pp. 485–495).Heylighen, F. (2000). Web connectivity analysis. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/WEBCONAN.html . Accessed 4 June 2012.Katz, J.S. (2004). Co-link web indicators of the European Research Area: web indicators for scientific, technological and innovation research (Technical report).Kim, H. J. (2000). Motivations for hyperlinking in scholarly electronic articles: a qualitative study. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51(10), 887–899.Larson, R. (1996). Bibliometrics of the world wide web: An exploratory analysis of the intellectual structure of cyberspace. Proceedings of AISS 59th annual meeting (pp. 71–78). http://sherlock.berkeley.edu/asis96/asis96.html . Accessed 4 June 2012.Li, X., Thelwall, M., & Giustini, D. (2011). Validating online reference managers for scholarly impact measurement. Scientometrics, 91(2), 461–471.Nielsen, F. Å. (2007). Scientific citations in Wikipedia. First Monday, 12(8). http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1997/1872 . Accessed 4 June 2012.Orduña-Malea, E., Serrano-Cobos, J., Ontalba-Ruipérez, J.-A., & Lloret-Romero, N. (2010). Presencia y visibilidad web de las universidades públicas españolas. Revista española de documentación científica, 33(2), 246–278.Priem, J., & Costello, K. L. (2010). How and why scholars cite on Twitter. Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 47, 1–4.Priem, J. & Hemminger, B. M. (2010). Scientometrics 2.0: Toward new metrics of scholarly impact on the social Web. First Monday, 15(7). http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2874/2570 . Accessed 4 June 2012.Rocki, M. (2005). Statistical and mathematical aspects of rankings: lessons from Poland. Higher education in Europe, 30(2), 173–181.Seeber, M., Lepori, B., Lomi, A., Aguillo, I., & Barberio, V. (2012). Factors affecting web links between European higher education institutions. Journal of informetrics, 6, 435–447.Smith, A. G. (1999). A tale of two web spaces: comparing sites using web impact factors. Journal of documentation, 55(5), 577–592.Thelwall, M. (2001). Extracting macroscopic information from web links. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 52(13), 1157–1168.Thelwall, M. (2009). Introduction to Webometrics: quantitative web research for the social sciences. San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool (Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services, v. 1, n. 1).Thelwall, M. (2010). Webometrics: emergent or doomed? Information research, 15(4). http://InformationR.net/ir/15-4/colis713.html . Accessed 4 June 2012.Wilkinson, D., Harries, G., Thelwall, M., & Price, E. (2003). Motivations for academic Web site interlinking: evidence for the Web as a novel source of information on informal scholarly communication. Journal of information science, 29(1), 59–66

Collaboration analysis of World National Library websites via webometric methods

This article aimed to study National Library Websites (NLW) using webometric methods. The in-links and co-links to national library websites were analyzed to study: firstly, the visibility of these National libraries on the web. Secondly, the collaboration on national and international level amongst the studied national libraries websites. This study found that according to the in-link count of 38 national library websites, 3 were extremely popular and we can call them the most visible national library websites as they come below: 1. United States of America (http://www.loc.gov); 2. Australia (http://www.nla.gov.au); 3. United Kingdom (http://www.bl.uk). The results of the study also showed that, there were 5 clusters (2 cross continental and 3 international) in the studied national library websites. On the other hand, the multidimensional scaling map showed 4 major collaboration clusters: 2 cross national (both European) and 2 international (European, Asian, American, Australian). African national library websites were not seen in these clusters. It means that, African national libraries have a little collaboration with others through their websites. However, due to the problems of search engines which are used for data collection in webometric studies, this method needs to be used with cautio

Proposal for a multilevel university cybermetric analysis model

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0868-5Universities’ online seats have gradually become complex systems of dynamic information where all their institutions and services are linked and potentially accessible. These online seats now constitute a central node around which universities construct and document their main activities and services. This information can be quantitative measured by cybermetric techniques in order to design university web rankings, taking the university as a global reference unit. However, previous research into web subunits shows that it is possible to carry out systemic web analyses, which open up the possibility of carrying out studies which address university diversity, necessary for both describing the university in greater detail and for establishing comparable ranking units. To address this issue, a multilevel university cybermetric analysis model is proposed, based on parts (core and satellite), levels (institutional and external) and sublevels (contour and internal), providing a deeper analysis of institutions. Finally the model is integrated into another which is independent of the technique used, and applied by analysing Harvard University as an example of use.Orduña Malea, E.; Ontalba Ruipérez, JA. (2013). Proposal for a multilevel university cybermetric analysis model. Scientometrics. 95(3):863-884. doi:10.1007/s11192-012-0868-5S863884953Acosta Márquez, T., Igartua Perosanz, J.J. & Gómez Isla, J. (2009). Páginas web de las universidades españolas. Enred: revista digital de la Universidad de Salamanca, 5 [online; discontinued].Aguillo, I. F. (1998). Hacia un concepto documental de sede web. El Profesional de la Información, 7(1–2), 45–46.Aguillo, I. F. (2009). Measuring the institutions’ footprint in the web. Library Hi Tech, 27(4), 540–556.Aguillo, I. F., Granadino, B., Ortega, J. L., & Prieto, J. A. (2006). Scientific research activity and communication measured with cybermetrics indicators. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57(10), 1296–1302.Aguillo, I. F., Ortega, J. L., & Fernández, M. (2008). Webometric Ranking of World Universities: introduction, methodology, and future developments. Higher Education in Europe, 33(2/3), 234–244.Ayan, N., Li, W.-S., & Kolak, O. (2002). Automatic extraction of logical domains in a web site. Data & Knowledge Engineering, 43(2), 179–205.Barjak, F., Li, X., & Thelwall, M. (2007). Which factors explain the Web impact of scientists’ personal homepages? Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(2), 200–211.Berners-Lee, T., & Fischetti, M. (2000). Tejiendo la Red. Madrid: Siglo XXI.Björneborn, L., & Ingwersen, P. (2004). Toward a basic framework for webometrics. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55(14), 1216–1227.Buenadicha, M., Chamorro, A., Miranda, F. J., & González, O. R. (2001). A new web assessment index: Spanish Universities Analysis. Internet Research, 11(3), 226–234.Castells, M. (2001). La galaxia Internet. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés.Chu, H., He, S., & Thelwall, M. (2002). Library and Information Science Schools in Canada and USA: a Webometric perspective. Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, 43(2), 110–125.Crowston, K., & Williams, M. (2000). Reproduced and Emergent Genres of Communication on the World Wide Web. The Information Society: an International Journal, 16(3), 201–215.Goldfarb, A. (2006). The (teaching) role of universities in the diffusion of the Internet. International Journal of Industrial Organization, 24(2), 203–225.Ingwersen, P. (1998). The calculation of web impact factors. Journal of Documentation, 54(2), 236–243.Katz, R. N. (2008a). The tower and the cloud: Higher education in the age of cloud computing. USA: Educause.Katz, R. N. (2008b). The gathering cloud: is this the end of the middle. In R. N. Katz (Ed.), The tower and the cloud: Higher education in the age of cloud computing (p. 2008). USA: Educause.Li, X. (2005). National and international university departmental Web site interlinking: a webometric analysis. [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Wolverhampton, UK: University of Wolverhampton.Li, X., Thelwall, M., Musgrove, P., & Wilkinson, D. (2003). The relationship between the links/Web Impact Factors of computer science departments in UK and their RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) ranking in 2001. Scientometrics, 57(2), 239–255.Middleton, I., McConnell, M., & Davidson, G. (1999). Presenting a model for the structure and content of a University World Wide Web site. Journal of Information Science, 25(3), 217–219.Orduña-Malea, E. (2012). Propuesta de un modelo de análisis redinformétrico multinivel para el estudio sistémico de las universidades españolas (2010). Valencia: Polytechnic University of Valencia.Ortega, J. L., & Aguillo, Isidro. F. (2007). La web académica española en el contexto del Espacio Europeo de Educación Superior: estudio exploratorio. El profesional de la información, 16(5), 417–425.Pareja, V. M., Ortega, J. L., Prieto, J. A., Arroyo, N., & Aguillo, I. F. (2005). Desarrollo y aplicación del concepto de sede web como unidad documental de análisis en Cibermetría. Jornadas Españolas de Documentación, 9, 325–340.Saorín, T. (2012). Arquitectura de la dispersión: gestionar los riesgos cíclicos de fragmentación de las webs corporativas. Anuario ThinkEPI, 6, 281–287.Tang, R., & Thelwall, M. (2003). U.S. academic departmental Web-site interlinking: disciplinary differences. Library & Information Science Research, 25(4), 437–458.Tang, R., & Thelwall, M. (2004). Patterns of national and international web inlinks to US academic departments: an analysis of disciplinary variations. Scientometrics, 60(3), 475–485.Thelwall, M. (2002a). A research and institutional size based model for national university Web site interlinking. Journal of Documentation, 58(6), 683–694.Thelwall, M. (2002b). Conceptualizing documentation on the Web: an evaluation of different heuristic-based models for counting links between university web sites. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 53(12), 995–1005.Thelwall, M. (2003). Web use and peer interconnectivity metrics for academic Web sites. Journal of Information Science, 29(1), 11–20.Thelwall, M. (2009). Introduction to Webometrics: quantitative web research for the social sciences. San Rafael: Morgan & Claypool.Thelwall, M., & Harries, G. (2004a). Can personal Web pages that link to universities yield information about the wider dissemination of research? Journal of Information Science, 30(3), 243–256.Thelwall, M., & Harries, G. (2004b). Do better scholars’ Web publications have significantly higher online impact? Journal of American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55(2), 149–159.Thelwall, M., Vaughan, L., & Björneborn, L. (2005). Webometrics. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 39, 81–135.Thomas, O., & Willet, P. (2000). Webometric analysis of Departments of librarianship and information science. Journal of Information Science, 26(6), 421–428.Tíscar, L. (2009). El papel de la universidad en la construcción de su identidad digital. Revista de universidad y sociedad del conocimiento, 6(1), 15–21.Van Vught, F. A. (2009). Diversity and differentiation in higher education. In F. Van Vught (Ed.), Mapping the higher education landscape: toward a European classification of higher education (pp. 1–16). The Netherlands: Springer.Yolku, O. (2001). Use of news articles and announcements on official websites of universities. Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology, 10(2), 287–296

The Impact of Link Suggestions on User Navigation and User Perception

The study reported in this paper explores the effects of providing web users with link suggestions that are relevant to their tasks. Results indicate that link suggestions were positively received. Furthermore, users perceived sites with link suggestions as more usable and themselves as less disoriented. The average task execution time was significantly lower than in the control condition and users appeared to navigate in a more structured manner. Unexpectedly, men took more advantage from link suggestions than women

Investigating the Impact of the Blogsphere: Using PageRank to Determine the Distribution of Attention

Much has been written in recent years about the blogosphere and its impact on political, educational and scientific debates. Lately the issue has received significant attention from the industry. As the blogosphere continues to grow, even doubling its size every six months, this paper investigates its apparent impact on the overall Web itself. We use the popular Google PageRank algorithm which employs a model of Web used to measure the distribution of user attention across sites in the blogosphere. The paper is based on an analysis of the PageRank distribution for 8.8 million blogs in 2005 and 2006. This paper addresses the following key questions: How is PageRank distributed across the blogosphere? Does it indicate the existence of measurable, visible effects of blogs on the overall mediasphere? Can we compare the distribution of attention to blogs as characterised by the PageRank with the situation for other forms of Web content? Has there been a growth in the impact of the blogosphere on the Web over the two years analysed here? Finally, it will also be necessary to examine the limitations of a PageRank-centred approach

How Well Do Ontario Library Web Sites Meet New Accessibility Requirements?

New changes to Ontario law will require library web sites to comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.0 (WCAG 2.0). This study evaluates 64 Ontario university, college, and public library web sites to see how well they comply with WCAG 2.0 guidelines at present. An average of 14.75 accessibility problems were found per web page. The most common problems included invalid html, poor color contrast, incorrect form controls and labels, missing alt text, bad link text, improper use of headings, using html to format pages, using absolute units of measure, and issues with tables and embedded objects

The influence of birds on the structure and functioning of coastal food webs

The Wadden Sea is one of the most important stop-over sites for migrating and breeding birds. About 10-12 million birds per year use the area for foraging and consume about 25 to 45% of the standing stock of macrozoobenthos. But little is known about the influence of birds on the entire ecosystem. We conducted Ecological Network Analysis (ENA) in an important breeding and resting site in the north-eastern German Wadden Sea to determine the influence of birds on the food web. The model was based on the yearly average of empirical data taken in the study site. In its current condition, the system appears to be in a well-balanced status, with a relative Ascendency of 32.3% and a robustness of 36.5%. The diversity of flows was high showed by a Flow Diversity of 5.1 and numerous parallel pathways represented by an Effective Link-Density of 3.3. A large variety of different bird species uses the area for foraging. As top predators, these bird species are included directly or indirectly in most of the pathways. Birds induce a huge negative impact on their prey items with a less pronounced positive feedback reaction to the competitors and food resources of those organisms. There is also a strong negative impact among the bird compartments probably due to competition between the bird species on the intertidal flats. Changes in the biomass of the birds revealed alterations in the food web structure. With a decline in the avian biomass the system showed a decrease in connectivity and diversity of flows but an increase in recycling. Birds therefore appear to be an important factor for the food web structure. Changes in the bird population could affect the complexity and functioning of the entire ecosystem. Thus, it is recommended to include birds in coastal food web studies which has rarely been done before. The use of such holistic approaches would facilitate undertaking management measures

Media, Aggregators, and the Link Economy: Strategic Hyperlink Formation in Content Networks

A defining property of the World Wide Web is a content site's ability to place virtually costless hyperlinks to third-party content as a substitute or complement to its own content. Costless hyperlinking has enabled new types of players, usually referred to as content aggregators, to successfully enter content ecosystems, attracting traffic and revenue by hosting links to the content of others. This, in turn, has sparked a heated controversy between content creators and aggregators regarding the legitimacy and costs/benefits of uninhibited free linking. To our knowledge, this work is the first to model the complex interplay between content and links in settings where a set of sites compete for traffic. We develop a series of analytical models that distill how hyperlinking affects the (a) incentives of content nodes to produce quality content versus link to third-party content, (b) profits of the various stakeholders, (c) average quality of content that becomes available to consumers, and (d) impact of content aggregators. Our results provide a nuanced view of the so-called link economy, highlighting both the beneficial consequences and the drawbacks of free hyperlinks for content creators and consumers.This paper was accepted by Lorin Hitt, information systems

Reverse engineering to achieve maintainable WWW sites

The growth of the World Wide Web and the accelerated development of web sites and associated web technologies has resulted in a variety of maintenance problems. The maintenance problems associated with web sites and the WWW are examined. It is argued that currently web sites and the WWW lack both data abstractions and structures that could facilitate maintenance. A system to analyse existing web sites and extract duplicated content and style is described here. In designing the system, existing Reverse Engineering techniques have been applied, and a case for further application of these techniques is made in order to prepare sites for their inevitable evolution in futur

PERFORMANCE EVALUATION ON QUALITY OF ASIAN AIRLINES WEBSITES – AN AHP PPROACH

In recent years, many people have devoted their efforts to the issue of quality of Web site. The concept of quality is consisting of many criteria: quality of service perspective, a user perspective, a content perspective or indeed a usability perspective. Because of its possible instant worldwide audience a Website’s quality and reliability are crucial. The very special nature of the web applications and websites pose unique software testing challenges. Webmasters, Web applications developers, and Website quality assurance managers need tools and methods that can match up to the new needs. This research conducts some tests to measure the quality web site of Asian flag carrier airlines via web diagnostic tools online. We propose a methodology for determining and evaluate the best airlines websites based on many criteria of website quality. The approach has been implemented using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to generate the weights for the criteria which are much better and guarantee more fairly preference of criteria. The proposed model uses the AHP pairwise comparisons and the measure scale to generate the weights for the criteria which are much better and guarantee more fairly preference of criteria. The result of this study confirmed that the airlines websites of Asian are neglecting performance and quality criteria