Linking to Institutional Repositories from the general Web Alastair G Smith School of Information Management Victoria University of Wellington New Zealand

Institutional Repositories (IRs) Becoming an important form of research publishing Purposes: Open access to research Preservation and availability of research outputs (e.g. theses) Showcasing institutions research output Facilitating communication between researchers

General Research Question Are IRs in fact contributing to research communication, and is this reflected in, for example, citation impact?

Citation study of IRs: issues Citations may not include the information that the document was found in an IR ISI, Scopus dont search for references to an IR Google Scholar does not search for links to an IR Document in IR may have multiple URLs (IR specific, persistent )

Specific research question What kind of links are made from the general web to IRs?

Methodology Used Yahoo Site Explorer (YSE) to find links to IRs Classified links as formal, informal, subject

Institutional Repositories New Zealand Auckland University of Technology Lincoln University University of Auckland University of Canterbury University of Otago Victoria University of Wellington Waikato University Overseas Australian National University Queensland University of Technology University of Southampton

Yahoo Site Explorer Offered the best facilities for searching for inlinks to a particular site at time of research Provides a list of sites that link to a given website Allows the list of linking pages to be downloaded to a spreadsheet Sample of 100 links classified

Yahoo Site Explorer interface

Classification scheme Based on Kousha & Thelwall, 2007 Formal: Formally cited research in journals, conference proceedings, online magazine etc. Informal: links from blogs, Wikipedia, etc Self publicity: link from authors website Subject/directory links: link from general or subject specific web directory, or from directory of IRs

Results Formal research links: equivalent to citations 2% Informal research links: links from sources that do not have print equivalents 18% Directory links: made to documents because of their informational value 50%

Impact factors Research IF: formal and informal links made from other documents to the research content; divided by number of documents in IR Subject IF: all links made to IR documents because of their information value, including subject directories; divided by number of documents in IR

Impact factor comparison

Observations Few links are formal citations Larger, more mature IRs (ANU, QUT, Soton) have higher proportions of formal, informal, and significant links High impact factors for QUT and Soton: due to mandatory deposit of publications? In less mature IRs, impact can be influenced by a few well linked articles

Influence of single document on small server

Public access to research Study of the carbon produced in producing and transporting food linked from blogs and Wikipedia Study of bias in football refereeing linked from sports blogs Significant numbers of links to IRs from Wikipedia

Implications YSE covers general web – further study needed of links from research web, and from research blogs As IRs mature, there may be more conventional citations to them Institutions with high coverage of output achieve high impact factors Value of IRs may be in making research available to general public