Patterns of International and National Web Inlinks to US University Departments Rong Tang Catholic University of America, USA Mike Thelwall University of Wolverhampton, UK

ISSI Beijing Overview: What did we do? An investigation into Web hyperlinks between 89 US academic departments from three different disciplines Psychology, Chemistry, History

ISSI Beijing Overview: How did we do it? Used citation data to identify the most productive US departments of Chemistry, History and Psychology Searched the Web for the Web sites of these departments – Majority of the departments had a Web site Used AltaVista advanced searches to estimate the numbers of pages from different origins that linked to each department Web site – Counted link pages by top level domain and region

ISSI Beijing Overview: Why did we do? To detect disciplinary differences in this kind of Web linking To test the methodology – Can Webometrics be used as a precursor to bibliometric studies, or how can Webometric analysis be used as a complementary tool to bibliometric data?

Part I: Methods

ISSI Beijing Choosing the Departments Chemistry, Psychology and History were chosen as a Science, Social Science and Humanities discipline The top 100 publishing US departments were found for each discipline, using Dialog SCI (for Chemistry), SSCI (for Psychology), and AHCI (for History) – Sifted manually to combine duplicates in dialog ranking lists Obtained citation impact data of each subject field involved (Year ) from Institute for Scientific Information Obtained faculty size data from national professional organizations (APA, ACS, AHA)

ISSI Beijing Finding the Web sites Used Google and searches from the university home pages Target: 30+ per discipline Some citation data or faculty number data of departments missing, largely from History 32 Psychology, 33 Chemistry, 24 History

ISSI Beijing Publication Impact Values ISI citation data was used to calculate a statistic we called the Publication Impact Value for each department (Year 2000) – E.g. for Dept of History at Princeton: Publication Impact Value = ISI Impact Factor for History at Princeton X Publication count for Princeton Dept of History To estimate a department’s research impact

ISSI Beijing Link Page Counts by Region To estimate total number of pages in each region of the world link to each department in the study AltaVista advanced search with region selection (no longer available) – E.g. link:chem.arizona.edu And select ‘Asia’ from the region menu Results only from AltaVista’s coverage of the Web – AltaVista should include the more important pages, but we cant be sure

ISSI Beijing Link Page Counts by Country For Mexico and Canada only – Because in North America with the USA Used AltaVista Advanced Boolean Search commands Used the link command and specified the domain name of the country to find link pages from, e.g..mx for link pages in Mexico

ISSI Beijing Link Page Counts by gTLD gTLD = generic Top Level Domain, including.com,.edu,.org,.net,.gov,.mil,.int Used the link command and specified the domain name of the country to find link pages from, e.g..mx for link pages in Mexico

Part II: Results

ISSI Beijing Correlation Tests International inlinks were correlated with total publication impact in order to assess whether the two may be related (Spearman test) – Chemistry: significant correlation (5% level) – Psychology: significant correlation (5% level) – History: No significant correlation (Inlink counts much smaller) Some relationship between “Web impact” and “publication impact”

ISSI Beijing International inlinks

ISSI Beijing Proportion of International Inlinks Proportion of inlink pages that were from outside the USA: – Chemistry: 19% – Psychology: 16% – History: 6% History can have a peculiarly national focus

ISSI Beijing gTLD Spread of Inlink Pages

ISSI Beijing Correlations With PIV Spearman Correlations with Publication Impact Value, by gTLD (*= significant at 5% level) GOVNETORGCOMMILEDU Chemistry * * Psychology * * History

Part III: Conclusions

ISSI Beijing Conclusions International inlink counts associate significantly with publication impact value in Psychology and Chemistry but are small in History Links mainly come from Europe.edu sites a major source of links to all three disciplines Regional and gTLD differences between disciplines were small, but History was less internationally visible on the Web

ISSI Beijing Conclusions Results are encouraging, but – Limited coverage of AltaVista – What do the link counts mean/represent? – Subtle disciplinary differences, difficult to draw firm conclusions Further work – Find out why links are created – Test different disciplines and countries