Liz Price

Motivations for academic web site interlinking: evidence for the Web as a novel source of information on informal scholarly communication

The need to understand authors’ motivations for creating links between university web sites is addressed by a survey of a random collection of 414 such links from the ac.uk domain. A classification scheme was created and applied to this collection. Obtaining inter-classifier agreement as to the single main link creation cause was very difficult because of multiple potential motivations and the fluidity of genre on the Web. Nevertheless, it was clear that, whilst the vast majority, over 90%, was created for broadly scholarly reasons, only two were equivalent to journal citations. It is concluded that academic web link metrics will be dominated by a range of informal types of scholarly communication. Since formal communication can be extensively studied through citation analysis, this provides an exciting new window through which to investigate a facet of a previously obscured type of communication activity.

Linguistic patterns of academic Web use in Western Europe

A survey of linguistic dimensions of Web site hosting and interlinking of the universities of sixteen European countries is described. The results show that English is the dominant language both for linking pages and for all pages. In a typical country approximately half the pages were in English and half in one or more national languages. Normalised interlinking patterns showed three trends: 1) international interlinking throughout Europe in English, and additionally in Swedish in Scandinavia; 2) linking between countries sharing a common language, and 3) countries extensively hosting international links in their own major languages. This provides evidence for the multilingual character of academic use of the Web in Western Europe, at least outside the UK and Eire. Evidence was found that Greece was significantly linguistically isolated from the rest of the EU but that outsiders Norway and Switzerland were not.

Hyperlinks as a data source for science mapping

Hyperlinks between academic web sites, like citations, can potentially be used to map disciplinary structures and identify evidence of connections between disciplines. In this paper we classified a sample of links originating in three different disciplines: maths, physics and sociology. Links within a discipline were found to be different in character to links between pages in different disciplines. There were also disciplinary differences in both types of link. As a consequence, we argue that interpretations of web science maps covering multiple disciplines will need to be sensitive to the contexts of the links mapped.

European Union associated university websites

The web site is an important communication medium for universities in many countries. There are numerous reasons to expect that their characteristics will vary along national lines, the most immediate being differences in technological level and the organisation of higher education. In a world where the web is seen in many places as an important source of information it has the potential to overcome national boundaries, but are there still technological barriers? This paper reports on the results of a survey of the sizes of 670 web sites of higher education institutions in countries associated with the European Union, as estimated by AltaVista. It finds that there are still enormous national differences of up to three orders of magnitude. A related issue addressed is the extent to which AltaVistas coverage of university web sites is reliable and consistent across Europe. Large but uneven differences were identified between the main engine and national variations. Despite such methodological problems and cultural reasons for national variations in web site development, a clear pattern emerges, with the richer countries in Europe having much larger web sites. This is a problem for those wishing to use the Internet to increase international collaboration.

Disciplinary Differences in Academic Web Presence – A Statistical Study of the UK

The Web has become an important tool for scholars to publicise their activities and disseminate their findings. In the information age, those who do not use it risk being bypassed. In this paper we introduce a statistical technique to assess the extent to which the broad spectrum of research areas are visible online in UK universities. Five broad subject categories are used for research, and inlink counts are used as indicators of online visibility or impact. The approach is designed to give more complete subject coverage than previous studies and to avoid the conceptual difficulties of a page classification approach, although one is used for triangulation. The results suggest that Science and Engineering dominate university Web presences, but with Humanities and Arts also achieving a high presence relative to its size, showing that high Web impact does not have to be restricted to the sciences. Research funding bodies should now consider whether action needs to be taken to ensure that opportunities are not being missed in the lower Web impact areas.

Language evolution and the spread of ideas on the web : A procedure for identifying emergent hybrid word family members

Word usage is of interest to linguists for its own sake as well as to social scientists and others who seek to track the spread of ideas, for example, in public debates over political decisions. The historical evolution of language can be analyzed with the tools of corpus linguistics through evolving corpora and the Web. But word usage statistics can only be gathered for known words. In this article, techniques are described and tested for identifying new words from the Web, focusing on the case when the words are related to a topic and have a hybrid form with a common sequence of letters. The results highlight the need to employ a combination of search techniques and show the wide potential of hybrid word family investigations in linguistics and social science.

The clustering power of low frequency words in academic Webs

The value of low frequency words for subject-based academic Web site clustering is assessed. A new technique is introduced to compare the relative clustering power of different vocabularies. The technique is designed for word frequency tests in large document clustering exercises. Results for the Australian and New Zealand academic Web spaces indicate that low frequency words are useful for clustering academic Web sites along subject lines; removing low frequency words results in sites becoming, on average, less dissimilar to sites from other subjects.

Custom interfaces for advanced queries in search engines

Those seeking information from the Internet often start from a search engine, using either its organised directory structure or its text query facility. In response to the difficulty in identifying the most relevant pages for some information needs, many search engines offer Boolean text matching and some, including Google, AltaVista and HotBot, offer the facility to integrate additional information into a more advanced request. Amongst web users, however, it is known that the employment of complex enquiries is far from universal, with very short queries being the norm. It is demonstrated that the gap between the provision of advanced search facilities and their use can be bridged, for specific information needs, by the construction of a simple interface in the form of a website that automatically formulates the necessary requests. It is argued that this kind of resource, perhaps employing additional knowledge domain specific information, is one that could be useful for websites or portals of common inter...