A review of the development and application of the Web impact factor
---
paper_title: The impact-factors debate: the ISI's uses and limits

paper_content:

A fork adapter for attachment to the bottom plate of the scoop of a front end loader comprising a linearly extending tubular support member having a tubular post extending from the rear portion thereof. A frame comprises a pair of L-shaped plates each having a first leg extending upwardly along the sides of said support member and post and a second leg extending rearwardly, with a nut between the second legs above the support member. A screw in the nut has a swivel base on its lower end and a handle on its upper end. The post is open at the top, to receive an extension piece therein, such as lumber of conventional size. At its rear, the tubular support member has an end plate which extends above the upper surface thereof.
---
paper_title: Sitations: an exploratory study.

paper_content:

We investigate the distribution of domain names and the distribution of links between web sites. It is shown that the Lotka function provides an adequate description. The percentage of self-sitations is also determined.
---
paper_title: Informetric analyses on the world wide web: methodological approaches to ‘webometrics

paper_content:

This article introduces the application of informetric methods to the World Wide Web (WWW), also called Webometrics. A case study presents a workable method for general informetric analyses of the WWW. In detail, the paper describes a number of specific informetric analysis parameters. As a case study the Danish proportion of the WWW is compared to those of other Nordic countries. The methodological approach is comparable with common bibliometric analyses of the ISI citation databases. Among other results the analyses demonstrate that Denmark would seem to fall seriously behind the other Nordic countries with respect to visibility on the Net and compared to its position in scientific databases.
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paper_title: Author cocitation: A literature measure of intellectual structure

paper_content:

It is shown that the mapping of a particular area of science, in this case information science, can be done using authors as units of analysis and the cocitations of pairs of authors as the variable that indicates their “distances” from each other. The analysis assumes that the more two authors are cited together, the closer the relationship between them. The raw data are cocitation counts drawn online from Social Scisearch (Social Sciences Citation Index) over the period 1972–1979. The resulting map shows (1) identifiable author groups (akin to “schools”) of information science, (2) locations of these groups with respect to each other, (3) the degree of centrality and peripherality of authors within groups, (4) proximities of authors within group and across group boundaries (“border authors” who seem to connect various areas of research), and (5) positions of authors with respect to the map's axes, which were arbitrarily set spanning the most divergent groups in order to aid interpretation. Cocitation analysis of authors offers a new technique that might contribute to the understanding of intellectual structure in the sciences and possibly in other areas to the extent that those areas rely on serial publications. The technique establishes authors, as well as documents, as an effective unit in analyzing subject specialties.
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paper_title: New informetric aspects of the Internet: some reflections - many problems

paper_content:

This paper poses more problems than it solves: it investigates the new (virtual) world of the Internet and the challenges that it offers for informetric analysis. The paper studies five different aspects. First of all, there is the increasing problem of data gathering in the Internet. The second topic is the Internet version of the informetric laws: are the same types of classical distributions valid or not? The third topic deals with scientometric aspects: can the clickable buttons (hyperlinks) in Web pages replace the role of classical references in scientific papers? It also contains a study of the Web impact factor and a discussion on ageing. The fourth topic discusses information retrieval (IR) aspects of search engines. It studies aspects of probabilistic IR as applied in these engines and poses the question of quantitative evaluation of IR (Web analogues of recall and precision). Lastly, aspects of complexity are discussed. The fractal nature of the Internet is highlighted and a modest attempt to m...
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paper_title: Web Impact Factors for Australasian universities

paper_content:

In this paper we report on the results of an exploratory study of knowledge exchange between disciplines and subfields of science, based on bibliometric methods. The goal of this analysis is twofold. Firstly, we consider knowledge exchange between disciplines at a global level, by analysing cross-disciplinary citations in journal articles, based on the world publication output in 1999. Among others a central position of the Basic Life Sciences within the Life Sciences and of Physics within the Exact Sciences is shown. Limitations of analyses of interdisciplinary impact at the journal level are discussed. A second topic is a discussion of measures which may be used to quantify the rate of knowledge transfer between fields and the importance of work in a given field or for other disciplines. Two measures are applied, which appear to be proper indicators of impact of research on other fields. These indicators of interdisciplinary impact may be applied at other institutional levels as well.
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paper_title: Webometric Analysis of Departments of Librarianship and Information Science

paper_content:

This paper describes a webometric analysis of the linkages (or ‘sitations’) to websites associated with departments of librarianship and information science (LIS). Some of the observed sitation counts appear counter-intuitive and there is only a very limited correlation with peer evaluations of research performance, with many of the sitations being from pages that are far removed in subject matter from LIS. Our conclusions are that sitation data are not well suited to the quantitative evaluation of the research status of LIS departments and that departments can best boost their web visibility by hosting as wide a range of types of material as possible.
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paper_title: Data collection methods on the Web for infometric purposes — A review and analysis

paper_content:

We present different methods of data collection from the Web for informetric purposes. For each method, some studies utilizing it are reviewed, and advantages and shortcomings of each technique are discussed. The paper emphasizes that data collection must be carried out with great care. Since the Web changes constantly, the findings of any study are valid only in the time frame in which it was carried out, and are dependent on the quality of the data collection tools, which are usually not under the control of the researcher. At the current time, the quality and the reliability of most of the available search tools are not satisfactory, thus informetric analyses of the Web mainly serve as demonstrations of the applicability of informetric methods to this medium, and not as a means for obtaining definite conclusions. A possible solution is for the scientific world to develop its own search and data collection tools.
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paper_title: The calculation of web impact factors

paper_content:

This case study reports the investigations into the feasibility and reliability of calculating impact factors for web sites, called Web Impact Factors (Web‐IF). The study analyses a selection of seven small and medium scale national and four large web domains as well as six institutional web sites over a series of snapshots taken of the web during a month. The data isolation and calculation methods are described and the tests discussed. The results thus far demonstrate that Web‐IFs are calculable with high confidence for national and sector domains whilst institutional Web‐IFs should be approached with caution. The data isolation method makes use of sets of inverted but logically identical Boolean set operations and their mean values in order to generate the impact factors associated with internal‐ (self‐) link web pages and external‐link web pages. Their logical sum is assumed to constitute the workable frequency of web pages linking up to the web location in question. The logical operations are necessary to overcome the variations in retrieval outcome produced by the AltaVista search engine.
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paper_title: Methodologies for Crawler Based Web Surveys

paper_content:

There have been many attempts to study the content of the Web, either through human or automatic agents. Describes five different previously used Web survey methodologies, each justifiable in its own right, but presents a simple experiment that demonstrates concrete differences between them. The concept of crawling the Web also bears further inspection, including the scope of the pages to crawl, the method used to access and index each page, and the algorithm for the identification of duplicate pages. The issues involved here will be well‐known to many computer scientists but, with the increasing use of crawlers and search engines in other disciplines, they now require a public discussion in the wider research community. Concludes that any scientific attempt to crawl the Web must make available the parameters under which it is operating so that researchers can, in principle, replicate experiments or be aware of and take into account differences between methodologies. Also introduces a new hybrid random page selection methodology.
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paper_title: Daily time series of common single word searches in AltaVista and NorthernLight

paper_content:

Over the past year the AltaVista search engine provided irregular numbers of hits. This is shown by collecting a time series of daily searches. The new AltaVista (on the Web since October 25, 1999) is much more stable, but not all problems have been eliminated. The same searches performed on NorthernLight gave stable results. It is suggested to use filtering techniques, such as median filtering, when dealing with irregular time series. An attempt is made to estimate the growth of the Web (as covered by a search engine), based on neutral single word searches. It turned out that this method systematically underestimates the growth of the Web. Collecting time series should be an essential part of Internet research.
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paper_title: Accessibility of information on the web

paper_content:

Search engines do not index sites equally, may not index new pages for months, and no engine indexes more than about 16% of the web. As the web becomes a major communications medium, the data on it must be made more accessible.
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paper_title: Web Impact Factors for Australasian universities

paper_content:

In this paper we report on the results of an exploratory study of knowledge exchange between disciplines and subfields of science, based on bibliometric methods. The goal of this analysis is twofold. Firstly, we consider knowledge exchange between disciplines at a global level, by analysing cross-disciplinary citations in journal articles, based on the world publication output in 1999. Among others a central position of the Basic Life Sciences within the Life Sciences and of Physics within the Exact Sciences is shown. Limitations of analyses of interdisciplinary impact at the journal level are discussed. A second topic is a discussion of measures which may be used to quantify the rate of knowledge transfer between fields and the importance of work in a given field or for other disciplines. Two measures are applied, which appear to be proper indicators of impact of research on other fields. These indicators of interdisciplinary impact may be applied at other institutional levels as well.
---
paper_title: Results from a Web Impact Factor Crawler.

paper_content:

Web impact factors, the proposed web equivalent of impact factors for journals, can be calculated by using search engines. It has been found that the results are problematic because of the variable coverage of search engines as well as their ability to give significantly different results over short periods of time. The fundamental problem is that although some search engines provide a functionality that is capable of being used for impact calculations, this is not their primary task and therefore they do not give guarantees as to performance in this respect. In this paper, a bespoke web crawler designed specifically for the calculation of reliable WIFs is presented. This crawler was used to calculate WIFs for a number of UK universities, and the results of these calculations are discussed. The principal findings were that with certain restrictions, WIFs can be calculated reliably, but do not correlate with accepted research rankings owing to the variety of material hosted on university servers. Changes to the calculations to improve the fit of the results to research rankings are proposed, but there are still inherent problems undermining the reliability of the calculation. These problems still apply if the WIF scores are taken on their own as indicators of the general impact of any area of the Internet, but with care would not apply to online journals.
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paper_title: Exploring the pattern of links between Chinese university Web sites

paper_content:

This study compares the links between 76 Chinese university Web sites with ranks obtained from the NetBig lists, using a specialized Web crawler to collect the link data. In addition to providing a background to the higher education system in mainland China, we describe the NetBig ranking scheme. We then explain some of the site crawling problems encountered, including viruses and slow download times. The results show a significant correlation between link counts and research ranks from four different perspectives, although further research found that university size could be a possible cause. The extensive interlinking between Chinese university Web sites also indicates that these sites may serve as important information sources for researchers within or outside China.
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paper_title: A comparison of sources of Links for academic Web Impact Factor Calculations

paper_content:

There has been much recent interest in extracting information from collections of Web links. One tool that has been used is Ingwersen’s Web impact factor. It has been demonstrated that several versions of this metric can produce results that correlate with research ratings of British universities showing that, despite being a measure of a purely Internet phenomenon, the results are susceptible to a wider interpretation. This paper addresses the question of which is the best possible domain to count backlinks from, if research is the focus of interest. WIFs for British universities calculated from several different source domains are compared, primarily the .edu, .ac.uk and .uk domains, and the entire Web. The results show that all four areas produce WIFs that correlate strongly with research ratings, but that none produce incontestably superior figures. It was also found that the WIF was less able to differentiate in more homogeneous subsets of universities, although positive results are still possible.
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paper_title: Evidence for the existence of geographic trends in university web site interlinking

paper_content:

The Web is an important medium for scholarly communication of various types, perhaps eventually to replace entirely some traditional mechanisms such as print journals. Yet the Web analogy of citations, hyperlinks, are much more varied in use and existing citation techniques are difficult to generalise to the new medium. In this context, one new challenging object of study is the modern multi‐faceted, multi‐genre, partly unregulated university Web site. This paper develops a methodology to analyse the patterns of interlinking between university Web sites and uses it to indicate that the degree of interlinking decreases with distance, at least in the UK. This is perhaps not in itself a surprising result, despite claims of a paradigm shift from the traditional virtual college towards collaboratories, but the methodology developed can also be used to refine existing Web link metrics to produce more powerful tools for comparing groups of sites.
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paper_title: Three target document range metrics for university Web sites

paper_content:

Three new metrics are introduced that measure the range of use of a university Web site by its peers through different heuristics for counting links targeted at its pages. All three give results that correlate significantly with the research productivity of the target institution. The directory range model, which is based upon summing the number of distinct directories targeted by each other university, produces the most promising results of any link metric yet. Based upon an analysis of changes between models, it is suggested that range models measure essentially the same quantity as their predecessors but are less susceptible to spurious causes of multiple links and are therefore more robust.
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paper_title: Conceptualizing documentation on the Web: an evaluation of different heuristic-based models for counting links between university web sites

paper_content:

All known previous Web link studies have used the Web page as the primary indivisible source document for counting purposes. Arguments are presented to explain why this is not necessarily optimal and why other alternatives have the potential to produce better results. This is despite the fact that individual Web files are often the only choice if search engines are used for raw data and are the easiest basic Web unit to identify. The central issue is of defining the Web "document": that which should comprise the single indissoluble unit of coherent material. Three alternative heuristics are defined for the educational arena based upon the directory, the domain and the whole university site. These are then compared by implementing them on a set of 108 UK university institutional Web sites under the assumption that a more effective heuristic will tend to produce results that correlate more highly with institutional research productivity. It was discovered that the domain and directory models were able to successfully reduce the impact of anomalous linking behavior between pairs of Web sites, with the latter being the method of choice. Reasons are then given as to why a document model on its own cannot eliminate all anomalies in Web linking behavior. Finally, the results from all models give a clear confirmation of the very strong association between the research productivity of a UK university and the number of incoming links from its peers' Web sites.
---
paper_title: Evidence for the existence of geographic trends in university web site interlinking

paper_content:

The Web is an important medium for scholarly communication of various types, perhaps eventually to replace entirely some traditional mechanisms such as print journals. Yet the Web analogy of citations, hyperlinks, are much more varied in use and existing citation techniques are difficult to generalise to the new medium. In this context, one new challenging object of study is the modern multi‐faceted, multi‐genre, partly unregulated university Web site. This paper develops a methodology to analyse the patterns of interlinking between university Web sites and uses it to indicate that the degree of interlinking decreases with distance, at least in the UK. This is perhaps not in itself a surprising result, despite claims of a paradigm shift from the traditional virtual college towards collaboratories, but the methodology developed can also be used to refine existing Web link metrics to produce more powerful tools for comparing groups of sites.
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paper_title: Winners don’t take all: Characterizing the competition for links on the web

paper_content:

As a whole, the World Wide Web displays a striking “rich get richer” behavior, with a relatively small number of sites receiving a disproportionately large share of hyperlink references and traffic. However, hidden in this skewed global distribution, we discover a qualitatively different and considerably less biased link distribution among subcategories of pages—for example, among all university homepages or all newspaper homepages. Although the connectivity distribution over the entire web is close to a pure power law, we find that the distribution within specific categories is typically unimodal on a log scale, with the location of the mode, and thus the extent of the rich get richer phenomenon, varying across different categories. Similar distributions occur in many other naturally occurring networks, including research paper citations, movie actor collaborations, and United States power grid connections. A simple generative model, incorporating a mixture of preferential and uniform attachment, quantifies the degree to which the rich nodes grow richer, and how new (and poorly connected) nodes can compete. The model accurately accounts for the true connectivity distributions of category-specific web pages, the web as a whole, and other social networks.
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paper_title: Scholarly Use of the Web : What are the Key Inducers of Links to Journal Web Sites ?

paper_content:

Web links have been studied by information scientists for at least six years but it is only in the past two that clear evidence has emerged to show that counts of links to scholarly Web spaces (universities and departments) can correlate significantly with research measures, giving some credence to their use for the investigation of scholarly communication. This paper reports on a study to investigate the factors that influence the creation of links to journal Web sites. An empirical approach is used: collecting data and testing for significant patterns. The specific questions addressed are whether site age and site content are inducers of links to a journal's Web site as measured by the ratio of link counts to Journal Impact Factors, two variables previously discovered to be related. A new methodology for data collection is also introduced that uses the Internet Archive to obtain an earliest known creation date for Web sites. The results show that both site age and site content are significant factors for the disciplines studied: library and information science, and law. Comparisons between the two fields also show disciplinary differences in Web site characteristics. Scholars and publishers should be particularly aware that richer content on a journal's Web site tends to generate links and thus the traffic to the site.
---
paper_title: Sitations: an exploratory study.

paper_content:

We investigate the distribution of domain names and the distribution of links between web sites. It is shown that the Lotka function provides an adequate description. The percentage of self-sitations is also determined.
---
paper_title: An initial exploration of the link relationship between UK university Web sites

paper_content:

Aggregates of links are of interest to information scientists in the same way as citation counts are: as potential sources of data from which new knowledge can be mined. Builds on the recent discovery of a correlation between a Web link count measure and the research quality of British universities by applying a range of multivariate statistical techniques to counts of links between pairs of universities. This represents an initial attempt at developing an understanding of this phenomenon. Extracts plausible results. Also identifies outliers in the data by the techniques, some of which were verified by being tracked down to identifiable Web phenomena. This is an important outcome because successful anomaly identification is a precondition to more effective analysis of this kind of data. The identification of groupings is encouraging evidence that Web links between universities can be mined for significant results, although it is clear that more methodological development is needed, if any but the simplest patterns are to be extracted. Finally, based upon the types of patterns extracted, argues that none of the methods used are capable of fully analysing link structures on their own.
---
paper_title: Web Impact Factors for Australasian universities

paper_content:

In this paper we report on the results of an exploratory study of knowledge exchange between disciplines and subfields of science, based on bibliometric methods. The goal of this analysis is twofold. Firstly, we consider knowledge exchange between disciplines at a global level, by analysing cross-disciplinary citations in journal articles, based on the world publication output in 1999. Among others a central position of the Basic Life Sciences within the Life Sciences and of Physics within the Exact Sciences is shown. Limitations of analyses of interdisciplinary impact at the journal level are discussed. A second topic is a discussion of measures which may be used to quantify the rate of knowledge transfer between fields and the importance of work in a given field or for other disciplines. Two measures are applied, which appear to be proper indicators of impact of research on other fields. These indicators of interdisciplinary impact may be applied at other institutional levels as well.
---
paper_title: Motivations for academic web site interlinking: evidence for the Web as a novel source of information on informal scholarly communication

paper_content:

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.
---
paper_title: Results from a Web Impact Factor Crawler.

paper_content:

Web impact factors, the proposed web equivalent of impact factors for journals, can be calculated by using search engines. It has been found that the results are problematic because of the variable coverage of search engines as well as their ability to give significantly different results over short periods of time. The fundamental problem is that although some search engines provide a functionality that is capable of being used for impact calculations, this is not their primary task and therefore they do not give guarantees as to performance in this respect. In this paper, a bespoke web crawler designed specifically for the calculation of reliable WIFs is presented. This crawler was used to calculate WIFs for a number of UK universities, and the results of these calculations are discussed. The principal findings were that with certain restrictions, WIFs can be calculated reliably, but do not correlate with accepted research rankings owing to the variety of material hosted on university servers. Changes to the calculations to improve the fit of the results to research rankings are proposed, but there are still inherent problems undermining the reliability of the calculation. These problems still apply if the WIF scores are taken on their own as indicators of the general impact of any area of the Internet, but with care would not apply to online journals.
---
paper_title: Extracting Macroscopic Information from Web Links

paper_content:

Much has been written about the potential and pitfalls of macroscopic Web-based link analysis, yet there have been no studies that have provided clear statistical evidence that any of the proposed calculations can produce results over large areas of the Web that correlate with phenomena external to the Internet. This article attempts to provide such evidence through an evaluation of Ingwersen's ([1998]) proposed external Web Impact Factor (WIF) for the original use of the Web: the interlinking of academic research. In particular, it studies the case of the relationship between academic hyperlinks and research activity for universities in Britain, a country chosen for its variety of institutions and the existence of an official government rating exercise for research. After reviewing the numerous reasons why link counts may be unreliable, it demonstrates that four different WIFs do, in fact, correlate with the conventional academic research measures. The WIF delivering the greatest correlation with research rankings was the ratio of Web pages with links pointing at research-based pages to faculty numbers. The scarcity of links to electronic academic papers in the data set suggests that, in contrast to citation analysis, this WIF is measuring the reputations of universities and their scholars, rather than the quality of their publications.
---
paper_title: The impact-factors debate: the ISI's uses and limits

paper_content:

A fork adapter for attachment to the bottom plate of the scoop of a front end loader comprising a linearly extending tubular support member having a tubular post extending from the rear portion thereof. A frame comprises a pair of L-shaped plates each having a first leg extending upwardly along the sides of said support member and post and a second leg extending rearwardly, with a nut between the second legs above the support member. A screw in the nut has a swivel base on its lower end and a handle on its upper end. The post is open at the top, to receive an extension piece therein, such as lumber of conventional size. At its rear, the tubular support member has an end plate which extends above the upper surface thereof.
---
paper_title: Exploring the pattern of links between Chinese university Web sites

paper_content:

This study compares the links between 76 Chinese university Web sites with ranks obtained from the NetBig lists, using a specialized Web crawler to collect the link data. In addition to providing a background to the higher education system in mainland China, we describe the NetBig ranking scheme. We then explain some of the site crawling problems encountered, including viruses and slow download times. The results show a significant correlation between link counts and research ranks from four different perspectives, although further research found that university size could be a possible cause. The extensive interlinking between Chinese university Web sites also indicates that these sites may serve as important information sources for researchers within or outside China.
---
paper_title: National characteristics in international scientific co-authorship relations

paper_content:

The main objective of this study is the elaboration of national characteristics in internationalscientific co-authorship relations. An attempt is made to find statistical evidence of symmetry andasymmetry in co-publication links, of the relation between international co-authorship and bothnational research profiles and citation impact. Four basic types can be distinguished in the relativespecialisation of domestic and internationally co-authored publications of 50 most activecountries in 1995/96 concerning the significance of the difference between the two profiles.
---
paper_title: Conceptualizing documentation on the Web: an evaluation of different heuristic-based models for counting links between university web sites

paper_content:

All known previous Web link studies have used the Web page as the primary indivisible source document for counting purposes. Arguments are presented to explain why this is not necessarily optimal and why other alternatives have the potential to produce better results. This is despite the fact that individual Web files are often the only choice if search engines are used for raw data and are the easiest basic Web unit to identify. The central issue is of defining the Web "document": that which should comprise the single indissoluble unit of coherent material. Three alternative heuristics are defined for the educational arena based upon the directory, the domain and the whole university site. These are then compared by implementing them on a set of 108 UK university institutional Web sites under the assumption that a more effective heuristic will tend to produce results that correlate more highly with institutional research productivity. It was discovered that the domain and directory models were able to successfully reduce the impact of anomalous linking behavior between pairs of Web sites, with the latter being the method of choice. Reasons are then given as to why a document model on its own cannot eliminate all anomalies in Web linking behavior. Finally, the results from all models give a clear confirmation of the very strong association between the research productivity of a UK university and the number of incoming links from its peers' Web sites.
---
paper_title: Citation influence for journal aggregates of scientific publications: Theory, with application to the literature of physics

paper_content:

Abstract A self-consistent methodology is developed for determining citation based influence measures for scientific journals, subfields and fields. Starting with the cross citing matrix between journals or between aggregates of journals, an eigenvalue problem is formulated leading to a size independent influence weight for each journal or aggregate. Two other measures, the influence per publication and the total influence are then defined. Hierarchical influence diagrams and numerical data are presented to display journal interrelationships for journals within the subfields of physics. A wide range in influence is found between the most influential and least influential or peripheral journals.
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paper_title: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

paper_content:

In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext. Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems. The prototype with a full text and hyperlink database of at least 24million pages is available at http://google.stanford.edu/ To engineer a search engine is a challenging task. Search engines index tens to hundreds of millions of web pages involving a comparable number of distinct terms. They answer tens of millions of queries every day. Despite the importance of large-scale search engines on the web, very little academic research has been done on them. Furthermore, due to rapid advance in technology and web proliferation, creating a web search engine today is very different from 3years ago. This paper provides an in-depth description of our large-scale web search engine - the first such detailed public description we know of to date. Apart from the problems of scaling traditional search techniques to data of this magnitude, there are new technical challenges involved with using the additional information present in hypertext to produce better search results. This paper addresses this question of how to build a practical large-scale system which can exploit the additional information present in hypertext. Also we look at the problem of how to effectively deal with uncontrolled hypertext collections, where anyone can publish anything they want.
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paper_title: The relationship between the WIFs or inlinks of Computer Science Departments in UK and their RAE ratings or research productivities in 2001

paper_content:

Previous research has shown that Web link based metrics can correlate with traditional research assessment at the university level. In this study, we test whether the same is true for the computer science departments in the UK. The relevant Web Impact Factors (WIFs) were calculated from the link data collected both from AltaVista and the special academic crawler of the University of Wolverhampton. The numbers of staff members and Web pages in each computer science department were used as denominators for the WIFs calculation. The number of inlinks to the computer science departments correlated significantly with their research productivities, and WIFs with numbers of staff members as denominators correlated significantly with their Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) ratings. The number of staff members was confirmed to be a better indicator of departmental size than the number of Web pages within the department's domain.
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paper_title: Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment

paper_content:

The network structure of a hyperlinked environment can be a rich source of information about the content of the environment, provided we have effective means for understanding it. We develop a set of algorithmic tools for extracting information from the link structures of such environments, and report on experiments that demonstrate their effectiveness in a variety of context on the World Wide Web. The central issue we address within our framework is the distillation of broad search topics, through the discovery of “authorative” information sources on such topics. We propose and test an algorithmic formulation of the notion of authority, based on the relationship between a set of relevant authoritative pages and the set of “hub pages” that join them together in the link structure. Our formulation has connections to the eigenvectors of certain matrices associated with the link graph; these connections in turn motivate additional heuristrics for link-based analysis.
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Title: A review of the development and application of the Web impact factor

Section 1: Introduction
Description 1: Introduce the concept of Web impact factor (WIF) and provide background information on the relevance and significance of hyperlinks in Webometrics.

Section 2: The origins of the Web impact factor
Description 2: Explain the development of the WIF, its analogy to journal impact factors, and the different types of WIFs (internal, external, overall).

Section 3: Early developments
Description 3: Discuss the initial applications and challenges in calculating WIFs, including early methodologies and search engine limitations.

Section 4: WIF and traditional research measures
Description 4: Examine the correlation between WIFs and traditional research metrics, such as research assessment exercises and other national research measures.

Section 5: Alternative document models
Description 5: Describe various alternative document models (ADMs) used to improve the accuracy of link counts by aggregating link data at different levels.

Section 6: Alternative approaches
Description 6: Review different approaches in Webometric studies, focusing on simple link counts and the introduction of link propensity as a new metric.

Section 7: Simple link count studies
Description 7: Summarize studies that have used simple link counts to uncover patterns and trends in Web linking behavior, including geographical and disciplinary variations.

Section 8: Link propensity
Description 8: Detail the concept of link propensity, its methodological implications, and how it has been used to study interlinking patterns among institutions.

Section 9: Critical analysis
Description 9: Critically evaluate the effectiveness of WIFs, including modifications, challenges, and the validity of conclusions drawn from WIF studies.

Section 10: Conclusions
Description 10: Summarize the key findings, indicate the relevance of WIFs in Webometric research, and suggest future directions for refining Web metrics and improving data reliability and interpretation.