This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/14684520010330319. When citing the…
Abstract
This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/14684520010330319. When citing the article, please cite: Isidro Aguillo, (2000), “A new generation of tools for search, recovery and quality evaluation of World Wide Web medical resources”, Online Information Review, Vol. 24 Iss 2 pp. 138 - 143.
José Luis Ortega, Enrique Orduña-Malea and Isidro F. Aguillo
Title and URL mentions have recently been proposed as web visibility indicators instead of inlink counts. The objective of this study is to determine the accuracy of these…
Abstract
Purpose
Title and URL mentions have recently been proposed as web visibility indicators instead of inlink counts. The objective of this study is to determine the accuracy of these alternative web mention indicators in the Spanish academic system, taking into account their complexity (multi-domains) and diversity (different official languages).
Design/methodology/approach
Inlinks, title and URL mentions from 76 Spanish universities were manually extracted from the main search engines (Google, Google Scholar, Yahoo!, Bing and Exalead). Several statistical methods, such as correlation, difference tests and regression models, were used.
Findings
Web mentions, despite some limitations, can be used as substitutes for inlinks in the Spanish academic system, although these indicators are more likely to be influenced by the environment (language, web domain policy, etc.) than inlinks.
Research limitations/implications
Title mentions provide unstable results caused by the multiple name variants which an institution can present (such as acronyms and other language versions). URL mentions are more stable, but they may present atypical points due to some shortcomings, the effect of which is that URL mentions do not have the same meaning as inlinks.
Practical implications
Web mentions should be used with caution and after a cleaning-up process. Moreover, these counts do not necessarily signify connectivity, so their use in global web analysis should be limited.
Originality/value
Web mentions have previously been used in some specific academic systems (US, UK and China), but this study analyses, in depth and for the first time, an entire non-English speaking European country (Spain), with complex academic web behaviour, which helps to better explain previous web mention results.
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The purpose of this paper is to provide an alternative, although complementary, system for the evaluation of the scholarly activities of academic organizations, scholars and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to provide an alternative, although complementary, system for the evaluation of the scholarly activities of academic organizations, scholars and researchers, based on web indicators, in order to speed up the change of paradigm in scholarly communication towards a new fully electronic twenty‐first century model.
Design/methodology/approach
In order to achieve these goals, a new set of web indicators has been introduced, obtained mainly from data gathered from search engines, the new mediators of scholarly communication.
Findings
It was found that three large groups of indicators are feasible to obtain and relevant for evaluation purposes: activity (web publication); impact (visibility) and usage (visits and visitors). As a proof of concept, a Ranking Web of Universities has been built with Webometrics data. There are two relevant findings: ranking results are similar to those obtained by other bibliometric‐based rankings; and there is a concerning digital divide between North American and European universities, which appear in lower positions when compared with their USA and Canada counterparts.
Research limitations/implications
Cybermetrics is still an emerging discipline, so new developments should be expected when more empirical data become available.
Practical implications
The proposed approach suggests the publication of truly electronic journals, rather than digital versions of printed articles. Additional materials, such as raw data and multimedia files, should be included along with other relevant information arising from more informal activities. These repositories should be Open Access, available as part of the public web, indexed by the main commercial search engines. It is expected that these actions could generate larger web‐based audiences, reduce the costs of publication and access and allow third parties to take advantage of the knowledge generated, without sacrificing peer review, which should be extended (pre‐ and post‐) and expanded (closed and open).
Originality/value
A full taxonomy of web indicators is introduced for describing and evaluating research activities, academic organizations and individual scholars and scientists. Previous attempts for building such classification were incomplete and did not take into account feasibility and efficiency.
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Enrique Orduña-Malea, Jose Luis Ortega and Isidro F. Aguillo
The purpose of this paper is to detect whether both file type (a set of rich and web files) and language (English, Spanish, German, French and Italian) influence the web…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to detect whether both file type (a set of rich and web files) and language (English, Spanish, German, French and Italian) influence the web visibility of European universities.
Design/methodology/approach
A webometrics analysis of the top 200 European universities (as ranked in the Ranking web of World Universities) was carried out by a manual query for each official URL identified by using the Google search engine (April 2012). A correlation analysis between visibility and file format page count is offered according to language. Finally, a prediction of visibility is shown by using the SMOreg function.
Findings
The results indicate that Spanish and English are the languages that correlate most highly with web visibility. This correlation becomes greater – though moderate – when considering only PDF files.
Research limitations/implications
The results are limited due to the low correlation between overall page count and visibility. The lack of an accurate search engine that would assist in link counting procedures makes this process difficult.
Originality/value
An observed increase in correlation – although moderate – while analysing PDF files (in English and Spanish) is considered to be meaningful. This may indirectly confirm that specific file formats and languages generate different web visibility behaviour on European university web sites.
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Amalia Más-Bleda, Mike Thelwall, Kayvan Kousha and Isidro F. Aguillo
This study aims to explore the link creating behaviour of European highly cited scientists based upon their online lists of publications and their institutional personal websites…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to explore the link creating behaviour of European highly cited scientists based upon their online lists of publications and their institutional personal websites.
Design/methodology/approach
A total of 1,525 highly cited scientists working at European institutions were first identified. Outlinks from their online lists of publications and their personal websites pointing to a pre-defined collection of popular academic websites and file types were then gathered by a personal web crawler.
Findings
Perhaps surprisingly, a larger proportion of social scientists provided at least one outlink compared to the other disciplines investigated. By far the most linked-to file type was PDF and the most linked-to type of target website was scholarly databases, especially the Digital Object Identifier website. Health science and life science researchers mainly linked to scholarly databases, while scientists from engineering, hard sciences and social sciences linked to a wider range of target websites. Both book sites and social network sites were rarely linked to, especially the former. Hence, whilst successful researchers frequently use the Web to point to online copies of their articles, there are major disciplinary and other differences in how they do this.
Originality/value
This is the first study to analyse the outlinking patterns of highly cited researchers' institutional web presences in order to identify which web resources they use to provide access to their publications.
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Although the Internet is already a valuable information resource in medicine, there are important challenges to be faced before physicians and general users will have extensive…
Abstract
Although the Internet is already a valuable information resource in medicine, there are important challenges to be faced before physicians and general users will have extensive access to this information. As a result of a research effort to compile a health‐related Internet directory, new tools and strategies have been developed to solve key problems derived from the explosive growth of medical information on the Net and the great concern over the quality of such critical information. The current Internet search engines lack some important capabilities. We suggest using second generation tools (client‐side based) able to deal with large quantities of data and to increase the usability of the records recovered. We tested the capabilities of these programs to solve health‐related information problems, recognising six groups according to the kind of topics addressed: Z39.50 clients, downloaders, multisearchers, tracing agents, indexers and mappers. The evaluation of the quality of health information available on the Internet could require a large amount of human effort. A possible solution may be to use quantitative indicators based on the hypertext visibility of the Web sites. The cybermetric measures are valid for quality evaluation if they are derived from indirect peer review by experts with Web pages citing the site. The hypertext links acting as citations need to be extracted from a controlled sample of quality super‐sites.
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José Luis Ortega and Isidro F. Aguillo
The aim of this paper is to present network visualisation as a way to analyse and to test the design of a website.
Abstract
Purpose
The aim of this paper is to present network visualisation as a way to analyse and to test the design of a website.
Design/methodology/approach
A network graph of the access to the webometrics.info site from its web logs was analysed. Several graphs (navigational and query graphs) with different added variables were explored. SNA indicators were used to extract the main findings of these networks.
Findings
The results show the double structure of the two language versions, the central position of the search engines as hubs that distribute the access to every page, how the pages are grouped by their thematic and structural relationships, and which pages are less requested through search engines queries or are less visible.
Research limitations/implications
The results are based on the web performance of only one website and therefore generalisation has to be cautious.
Originality/value
The application of network visualisation and SNA indicators allows to explore the navigation of a website by users and to test how it is used. The graph representation makes possible an intuitive way to observe the structure of a website, the behaviour of users and information consumption.
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The purpose of this paper is to share with readers the issues of the 9th International Bielefeld Conference.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to share with readers the issues of the 9th International Bielefeld Conference.
Design/methodology/approach
This is a descriptive report.
Findings
The conference discussed essential current and future developments towards enhanced libraries and information infrastructures meeting the emerging demands of eScience and eLearning.
Originality/value
Will be of interest to library and information professionals.