Webometrics: Through the eyes of Mike Thelwall

About the author [8], Professor, University of Wolverhampton PhD degree in Mathematics Research in quantitative methods to analyze web. Well-known webometrics researcher Influenced by: Arasu, Berners-Lee, Bjorneborn,

Cronin, Kling, Lawrence, Spink, Vaughan.

INTRODUCTORY FACTS!!!Tomas C. Almind and Peter Ingwersen coined this term in 1997.Webometrics involves the quantitative studies of web phenomenon. [4]

Mike Thelwall leads the Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group.

SEARCH ENGINE EVALUATION

LINK ANALYSIS

QUANTITATIVE METHODS FOR

SOCIAL RESEARCH

WEB CITATION AND TEXT ANALYSIS

WEB 2.0

COMPUTER ASSISTED

ASSESSMENT

070201009998 0603 04 05

SEARCH ENGINE EVALUATION

LINK ANALYSIS

QUANTITATIVE METHODS FOR

SOCIAL RESEARCH

WEB CITATION AND TEXT ANALYSIS

WEB 2.0

COMPUTER ASSISTED

ASSESSMENT

070201009998 0603 04 05

Research dissemination…

The connection...

Can personal web ...

Webometrics...

Webometrics

Interpreting social ...

Bibliometrics...EXPLORING WEB’S POTENTIAL

TRYING SOME METHODS

GIVING SOME SHAPETO THE FIELD

RETROSPECTION& PREDICTION

Web: an Opportunity;Bibliometrics: an Inspiration

The opportunity: New medium for dissemination and

promoting scholarly research. [1]

Conversion of entire publishing cycle to the Internet.

Broad range of research artifacts (presentations, patents, web sites).[7]

The inspiration: Hyperlinks can be seen as citations. [5]

Comparing with ISI database: Web is timelier and can help start

writing about the project without waiting till the work gets published[7].

Web is free to access whereas not everyone can afford access to ISI[7].

Interesting results: Online papers cited more than

their offline counterpartsLawrence cited in [1].

For a discipline-specific set of journals indexed by ISI, a significant correlation between the inlink counts and ISI’s impact factorVaughen and Hysen (2002) cited in [5].

Author’s conclusion: Cannot replace Bibliometrics. Reveal different aspects of

scholarly impact [1]. Reveal new facets of public

attitudes to academic research[2].

QUICK AID!Co-inlinks =co-citationsCo-outlinks =bibliographic coupling[5].Webometrics is a subset of Bibliometrics

Towards a theory for webometrics

Call for conceptualization Bates (2007) places this field at the

right side of the spectrum and presents it as a science of information evolving from mathematics.

Call for formalizing Web node diagramBjorneborn and

Ingwersen, in press cited in [5]. Document models- Top-level

domain, site, directory, page [5].

Information Science

Computer Science

Statistical Physics

Communication

Studies

A

C

B E

G

D F

H I

Definition Bjorneborn & Ingwersen, in press[5] : “Webometrics is the study of quantitative

aspects of the construction and use of information resources, structures and technologies on the Web.”

Terminology [5] :

Inlink, Outlink, reciprocally linked, transversal outlink, isolated, co-outlink, co-inlink

.

CAN YOU SOLVE THIS?

Digging into the detailsThe Methodology

Units of analysis: links and server log files

Indicators Web impact factor (Informal

communication. [5]) Inlinks, Outlinks, Contents (impact,

trust, visibility, topic similarity [3].) Avg web page size, avg use of

technologies (describing the web [7] ).

Data Collection[6]: Crawlers, Search engines, Browsing

Methods [5]

Web content analysis Web link analysis Web usage analysis Web technology analysis. Web citation analysis [7]

Author’s finding on Link Analysis & Academic Websites

Links b/w universities correlate significantly with their research productivity [1] .

To find the relationship between inlink counts and the research of host university, it is appropriate to classify the pages and use directory model [2] .

Hyperlinks are rarely used for evaluation because of the variety of link creation reasons[6].

Promotion, funding and tenure decisions, university health checks, proximity measures, international info flows, evolution of research groups. [7][5]

Other Applications of Webometrics Web mining, web topology, web clustering [6]

Analysis of page and search result changes. [7]

Analysis of Web 2.0 phenomenon

WORDS OF CAUTION!Research Productivity is different from web visibilityQUICK FACT!Search engines have broader coverage than web crawlers

Evaluation and PredictionChallenges Web: Diversity, size, incompleteness,

looseness and lack of quality control. [3]

Hyperlinks: Limited extent to which useful information about scholarly communication can be extracted [4] .

Technology: Difficulties in identifying web pages, because of HTML itself [5] .

Concept of document: A page may have multiple docs; & many pages may be used for a single doc.

Future Implications [6]

General Longitudinal approaches to cope up

with the changing nature of the Web. More work on analyses of Web 2.0 and

online repositories.

Link Analysis Related Theory of linking Framework for interpreting results Triangulation methods (classification

of pages and links and correlation tests) for interpretation.

Web interface for testing interlinking hypothesis.

Link analysis can be used for fast pilot studies to identify areas for follow-up bibliometric analyses.

Why read Mike Thelwall[9]

Total number of publications: 102 Citations received: 799 h-index: 16

FUN FACT!Cybermetrics Lab, CSIS,provides webometricsranking of world universities [10] .

References1. Thelwall, M. (2002). Research dissemination and invocation on the web. Online Information Review,

26(6), 413-420. 2.2. Thelwall, M., & Harries, G. (2003). The connection between the research of a university and counts

of links to its web pages: An investigation based upon a classification of the relationships of pages to the research of the host university. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 54(7), 594-602.

3. 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), 240-253.

4. Thelwall, M., & Vaughan, L. (2004b). Webometrics: An introduction to the special issue. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 55(14), 1213-1215.

5. Thelwall, M., Vaughan, L., & Bjorneborn, L. (2005). Webometrics. Annual Review of Information Science & Technology, 39, 81-135.

6. Thelwall, M. (2006). Interpreting social science link analysis research: A theoretical framework.Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 57(1), 60-68.

7. Thelwall, M. (2008). Bibliometrics to webometrics. Journal of Information Science, 34(4)8. http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/~cm1993/mycv.html9. Web of science Database10. http://www.webometrics.info/11. Bates, Marcia. 2007. Defining the information disciplines in encyclopedia development.

Information Research 12(4). Accessed at: http://informationr.net/ir/12-4/colis/colis29.html