Patterns of International and National Web Inlinks to US University Departments

1. Patterns of International and National Web Inlinks to US University Departments Rong Tang Catholic University of America, USA Mike Thelwall University of Wolverhampton, UK

2. Overview: What did we do? • An investigation into Web hyperlinks between 89 US academic departments from three different disciplines • Psychology, Chemistry, History ISSI2003 -- Beijing

3. Overview: How did we do it? • Used citation data to identify the most productive US departments of Chemistry, History and Psychology • Searched the Web for the Web sites of these departments • Majority of the departments had a Web site • Used AltaVista advanced searches to estimate the numbers of pages from different origins that linked to each department Web site • Counted link pages by top level domain and region ISSI2003 -- Beijing

4. Overview: Why did we do? • To detect disciplinary differences in this kind of Web linking • To test the methodology • Can Webometrics be used as a precursor to bibliometric studies, or how can Webometric analysis be used as a complementary tool to bibliometric data? ISSI2003 -- Beijing

5. Part I: Methods

6. Choosing the Departments • Chemistry, Psychology and History were chosen as a Science, Social Science and Humanities discipline • The top 100 publishing US departments were found for each discipline, using Dialog SCI (for Chemistry), SSCI (for Psychology), and AHCI (for History) • Sifted manually to combine duplicates in dialog ranking lists • Obtained citation impact data of each subject field involved (Year 1997-2001) from Institute for Scientific Information • Obtained faculty size data from national professional organizations (APA, ACS, AHA) ISSI2003 -- Beijing

7. Finding the Web sites • Used Google and searches from the university home pages • Target: 30+ per discipline • Some citation data or faculty number data of departments missing, largely from History • 32 Psychology, 33 Chemistry, 24 History ISSI2003 -- Beijing

8. Publication Impact Values • ISI citation data was used to calculate a statistic we called the Publication Impact Value for each department (Year 2000) • E.g. for Dept of History at Princeton: Publication Impact Value = ISI Impact Factor for History at Princeton X Publication count for Princeton Dept of History • To estimate a department’s research impact ISSI2003 -- Beijing

9. Link Page Counts by Region • To estimate total number of pages in each region of the world link to each department in the study • AltaVista advanced search with region selection (no longer available) • E.g. link:chem.arizona.edu • And select ‘Asia’ from the region menu • Results only from AltaVista’s coverage of the Web • AltaVista should include the more important pages, but we cant be sure ISSI2003 -- Beijing

10. Link Page Counts by Country • For Mexico and Canada only • Because in North America with the USA • Used AltaVista Advanced Boolean Search commands • Used the link command and specified the domain name of the country to find link pages from, e.g. .mx for link pages in Mexico ISSI2003 -- Beijing

11. Link Page Counts by gTLD • gTLD = generic Top Level Domain, including .com, .edu, .org, .net, .gov, .mil, .int • Used the link command and specified the domain name of the country to find link pages from, e.g. .mx for link pages in Mexico ISSI2003 -- Beijing

12. Part II: Results

13. Correlation Tests • International inlinks were correlated with total publication impact in order to assess whether the two may be related (Spearman test) • Chemistry: significant correlation (5% level) • Psychology: significant correlation (5% level) • History: No significant correlation (Inlink counts much smaller) • Some relationship between “Web impact” and “publication impact” ISSI2003 -- Beijing

14. International inlinks ISSI2003 -- Beijing

15. Proportion of International Inlinks • Proportion of inlink pages that were from outside the USA: • Chemistry: 19% • Psychology: 16% • History: 6% • History can have a peculiarly national focus ISSI2003 -- Beijing

16. gTLD Spread of Inlink Pages ISSI2003 -- Beijing

17. GOV NET ORG COM MIL EDU Chemistry 0.30 0.37* 0.33 0.35* 0.20 0.33 Psychology 0.24 0.40* 0.40* 0.33 0.31 0.48* History 0.03 0.16 0.10 0.14 0.21 0.15 Correlations With PIV • Spearman Correlations with Publication Impact Value, by gTLD (*= significant at 5% level) ISSI2003 -- Beijing

18. Part III: Conclusions

19. Conclusions • International inlink counts associate significantly with publication impact value in Psychology and Chemistry but are small in History • Links mainly come from Europe • .edu sites a major source of links to all three disciplines • Regional and gTLD differences between disciplines were small, but History was less internationally visible on the Web ISSI2003 -- Beijing

20. Conclusions • Results are encouraging, but • Limited coverage of AltaVista • What do the link counts mean/represent? • Subtle disciplinary differences, difficult to draw firm conclusions • Further work • Find out why links are created • Test different disciplines and countries ISSI2003 -- Beijing