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...

Web links are a phenomenon of interest to bibliometricians by analogy with citations, and to others because of their use in Web navigation and search engines. It is known that very few links on university Web sites are targeted at scholarly expositions and yet, at least in the UK and Australia,...

Google's PageRank is an influential algorithm that uses a model of Web use that is dominated by its link structure in order to rank pages by their estimated value to the Web community. This paper reports on the outcome of applying the algorithm to the Web sites of three national university...

A layered approach for identifying communities in the Web is presented and explored by applying the flake exact community identification algorithm to the UK academic Web. Although community or topic identification is a common task in information retrieval, a new perspective is developed by: the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of LexiURL as a Web intelligence tool for collecting and analysing links to digital libraries, focusing specifically on the National electronic Library for Health (NeLH). Design/methodology/approach – The Web intelligence techniques...

Purpose – This paper seeks to address the question: do university web sites publish the same kind of information and use the same kind of hyperlinks year on year or do these change over time? Design/methodology/approach – A link classification exercise is used to identify temporal changes in...

Purpose – Webometric studies, using hyperlinks between websites as the basic data type, have been used to assess academic networks, the “impact factor” of academic communications and to analyse the impact of online digital libraries, and the impact of digital scholarly images. This study...

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...

Purpose To assess whether interdisciplinary research evaluation scores vary between fields. Design/methodology/approach The authors investigate whether published refereed journal articles were scored differently by expert assessors (two per output, agreeing a score and norm referencing) from...