Disciplinary and linguistic considerations for academic Web linking: An exploratory hyperlink mediated study with Mainland China and Taiwan

The Web has become an important means of academic information exchange and can be used to give new insights into patterns of informal scholarly communication. This study develops new methods to examine patterns of university Web linking, focusing on Mainland China and Taiwan, and including language considerations. Multiple exploratory investigations into Web links were conducted between universities in these two places. Firstly, inlinks were counted to each university Web site from its national peers using four alternative Web document models. The results were shown to correlate significantly with research productivity in Taiwan but not in the Mainland, although in the latter case less reliable institutional data could have been the cause. For Taiwan, this is the first evidence of a scholarly association with academic linking for a non-English speaking region. It was then ascertained that the same link counts associated more strongly with scientific than social scientific research productivity in Taiwan. This confirms the general assumption of greater Web use by the hard sciences. We then investigated Taiwan-Mainland university cross-links, and found that although English is extensively used on the Web, there was no evidence that it was the language of preference for informal scholarly communication between the two areas. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

National and international university departmental Web site interlinking

Although many link patterns have been identified at the university level, departmental interlinking has been relatively ignored. Universities are multidisciplinary by nature and various disciplines may employ the Web differently, thus patterns identified at the university level may hide subject differences. Departments are typically subject-oriented, and departmental interlinking may therefore illustrate interesting disciplinary linking patterns, perhaps relating to informal scholarly communication. The aim of this paper is to identify whether and how link patterns differ along country and disciplinary lines between similar disciplines and similar countries. Physics, Chemistry and Biology departments in Australia, Canada and the UK have been chosen. In order to get a holistic picture of departments' Web use profiles and link patterns, five different perspectives are identified and compared for each set of departments. Differences in link patterns are identified along both national and disciplinary lines, and are found to reflect offline phenomena. Along national lines, a likely explanation for the difference is that countries with better research performances make more general use of the Web; and, with respect to international peer interlinking, countries that share more scholarly communication tend to interlink more with each other. Along disciplinary lines, it seems that departments from disciplines which are more willing to distribute their research outputs tend to make more general use of the Web, and also interlink more with their national and international peers.     

No evidence of citation bias as a determinant of STEM gender disparities in US biochemistry,genetics and molecular biology research

Scientometrics - The lack of females in many Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects in the USA is an ongoing concern, with many initiatives attempting to redress this...     

Is medical research informing professional practice more highly cited? Evidence from AHFS DI Essentials in drugs.com

Scientometrics - Citation-based indicators are often used to help evaluate the impact of published medical studies, even though the research has the ultimate goal of improving human wellbeing. One...     

Journal impact evaluation: a webometric perspective

In theory, the web has the potential to provide information about the wider impact of academic research, beyond traditional scholarly impact. This is because the web can reflect non-scholarly uses of research, such as in online government documents, press coverage or public discussions. Nevertheless, there are practical problems with creating metrics for journals based on web data: principally that most such metrics should be easy for journal editors or publishers to manipulate. Nevertheless, two alternatives seem to have both promise and value: citations derived from digitised books and download counts for journals within specific delivery platforms.     

Linked title mentions: a new automated link search candidate

Many webometric studies have used hyperlinks to investigate links to or between specific collections of websites to estimate their impact or identify connectivity patterns. Whilst major commercial search engines have previously been used to identify hyperlinks for these purposes, their hyperlink search facilities have now been shut down. In response, a range of alternative sources of link data have been suggested, but all have limitations. This article introduces a new type of link that can be identified from commercial search engines, linked title mentions. These can be found by querying title mentions in a search engine and then removing those not associated with a relevant hyperlink. Results of a proof of concept test on 51 U.S. library and information science schools and four other sets of schools suggest that linked title mentions may tend to give better results than title mentions in some cases when used for site inlinks but may not always be an improvement on URL citations. For links between or co-inlinks to specified pairs of academic websites, linked title mentions do not generally provide an improvement over title mentions, but they do over URL citations in some cases. Linked title mentions may also be useful for sets of non-academic websites when the alternatives give too few or misleading results.     

Sixty-four years of informetrics research: productivity,impact and collaboration

This paper analyses the information science research field of informetrics to identify publication strategies that have been important for its successful researchers. The study uses a micro-analysis of informetrics researchers from 5,417 informetrics papers published in 7 core informetrics journals during 1948–2012. The most productive informetrics researchers were analysed in terms of productivity, citation impact, and co-authorship. The 30 most productive informetrics researchers of all time span several generations and seem to be usually the primary authors of their research, highly collaborative, affiliated with one institution at a time, and often affiliated with a few core European centres. Their research usually has a high total citation impact but not the highest citation impact per paper. Perhaps surprisingly, the US does not seem to be good at producing highly productive researchers but is successful at producing high impact researchers. Although there are exceptions to all of the patterns found, researchers wishing to have the best chance of being part of the next generation of highly productive informetricians may wish to emulate some of these characteristics.     

Local government web sites in Finland: A geographic and webometric analysis

It has been shown that information collected from and about links between web pages and web sites can reflect real world phenomena and relationships between the organizations they represent. Yet, government linking has not been extensively studied from a webometric point of view. The aim of this study was to increase the knowledge of governmental interlinking and to shed some light on the possible real world phenomena it may indicate. We show that interlinking between local government bodies in Finland follows a strong geographic, or rather a geopolitical pattern and that governmental interlinking is mostly motivated by official cooperation that geographic adjacency has made possible.     

Can Microsoft Academic be used for citation analysis of preprint archives? The case of the Social Science Research Network

Preprint archives play an important scholarly communication role within some fields. The impact of archives and individual preprints are difficult to analyse because online repositories are not indexed by the Web of Science or Scopus. In response, this article assesses whether the new Microsoft Academic can be used for citation analysis of preprint archives, focusing on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). Although Microsoft Academic seems to index SSRN comprehensively, it groups a small fraction of SSRN papers into an easily retrievable set that has variations in character over time, making any field normalisation or citation comparisons untrustworthy. A brief parallel analysis of arXiv suggests that similar results would occur for other online repositories. Systematic analyses of preprint archives are nevertheless possible with Microsoft Academic when complete lists of archive publications are available from other sources because of its promising coverage and citation results.