Transcript Document

Hyperlinks and Scholarly
Communication
Mike Thelwall
Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group
University of Wolverhampton, UK
Virtual Methods Seminar, University of Surrey, Sept. 15 2003
Why study Web scholarly
communication?




Ensure that the Web is efficiently used for
research communication
Identify trends in informal scholarly
communication
Suggest improvements in search tools
Exploratory research: the Web is important and a
valid object for scientific study
Data sources for Web scholarly
communication

Web server logs


Hyperlinks




Good source, but restricted to individual sites
Secondary source of information – few users actually
create hyperlinks
Commercial search engines can be used for raw data
about the ‘whole’ Web
Analogies with bibliometric citation studies
Hyperlink studies will be discussed in this talk
What use is hyperlink data to
qualitative researchers?

Part of a mixed methodology



Numbers to back up theories
To obtain samples of types of Web pages for
qualitative analyses
Background information on how the Web is
used
Data collection


Web crawler
AltaVista advanced queries
LINK:brunel.ac.uk AND
HOST:surrey.ac.uk
Note: Google does not allow this kind of Boolean
query
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/Psychology/staff/d.rose/drpage335.html
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/depts/hs/vision/vislinks.html
Different ways of counting links

Link counts to target universities


Colink counts


Inter-site links only
B and C are colinked
Couplings

D and E are coupled
D
A
B
C
E
F
Main Findings
Interpreting links between university
Web sites
1) Links Associate with Research


Counts of links to universities within a
country can correlate significantly with
measures of research productivity
The significance of this result is in giving
‘permission’ to investigate the use of interuniversity links for researching scholarly
communication
Links to UK universities against
their research productivity
The reason for the
strong correlation is
the quantity of Web
publication, not its
quality
This is different to
citation analysis
2) Most links are only loosely
related to research

A random sample of links between UK university
sites revealed over 90% had some connection
with scholarly activity, including teaching and
research
Less than 1% were equivalent to citations

The most important finding?

Geographic Patterns
Patterns in counts of links between
university Web sites
1) National links between
Universities can be related to
geography
2) Universities cluster by
geographic region to some
extent


This is clearest for Scotland but also for
other groupings, including Manchesterbased universities
Coherent clusters are difficult to extract
because of overlapping research and
geographic trends
A pathfinder network
of UK university
interlinking
with geographic
clusters indicated
Discipline and Subject Findings
Links and subject areas
1) Links to departments associate
with research
In the US, links to chemistry and psychology
departments from other departments associate
with total research impact
 No evidence of a significant geographic trend
 Disciplinary differences in the extent of
interlinking: history Web use is very low
{Research with Rong Tang}

2) Links, colinks, couplings and
discipline



For the UK academic Web, about 42% of
domains connected by links alone host similar
disciplines, and about 43% connected by links,
colinks and couplings
But over 100 times more domains are colinked or
coupled than are directly linked
Links in any form are less than 50% reliable as
indicators of subject similarity
International Academic Links
1) Linguistic factors in EU
communication
English the dominant language for Web sites in
the Western EU
 In a typical country, 50% of pages are in the
national language(s) and 50% in English
 Non-English speaking extensively interlink in
English
{Research with Rong Tang}

2) Can map patterns of
international communication
Counts of links
between AsiaPacific universities
are represented by
arrow thickness.
{Research with
Alastair Smith,
VUW, NZ}
The Future

Results of research leading into:



Improved Web-related policy making
Improved Web information retrieval
algorithms
Improved understanding of informal
scholarly communication on the Web

More effective use of the Web by scholars, e.g. via
PhD training
Again:- What use is hyperlink
data to qualitative researchers?

Part of a mixed methodology




Numbers to back up theories
To obtain samples of types of Web pages for
qualitative analyses
Use in conjunction with content analysis
Background information on how the Web is
used