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Longitudinal trends in academic web links

Published: 01 February 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Longitudinal studies of web change are needed to assess the stability of webometric statistics and this paper forms part of an on-going longitudinal study of three national academic web spaces. It examines the relationship between university inlinks and research productivity over time and identifies reasons for individual universities experiencing significant increases and decreases in inlinks over the last six years. The findings also indicate that between 66 and 70% of outlinks remain the same year on year for all three academic web spaces, although this stability conceals large individual differences. Moreover, there is evidence of a level of stability over time for university site inlinks when measured against research productivity. Surprisingly, however, inlink counts can vary significantly from year to year for individual universities, for reasons unrelated to research which undermines their use in webometrics studies.

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Published In

cover image Journal of Information Science
Journal of Information Science  Volume 34, Issue 1
February 2008
124 pages

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Sage Publications, Inc.

United States

Publication History

Published: 01 February 2008

Author Tags

  1. academic web space
  2. inlinks
  3. longitudinal
  4. outlinks
  5. web links

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  • (2016)URL decay at year 20Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.2356167:2(477-479)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2016
  • (2015)Methods for estimating the size of Google ScholarScientometrics10.1007/s11192-015-1614-6104:3(931-949)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2015
  • (2014)Mapping the UK webspaceProceedings of the 2014 ACM conference on Web science10.1145/2615569.2615691(62-70)Online publication date: 23-Jun-2014
  • (2009)A method for measuring the evolution of a topic on the Web: The case of “informetrics”Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology10.5555/1598884.159889060:9(1730-1740)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2009

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