Disciplinary Differences in Academic Web Presence – A Statistical Study of the UK

Abstract

The Web has become an important tool for scholars to publicise their activities and disseminate their findings. In the information age, those who do not use it risk being bypassed. In this paper we introduce a statistical technique to assess the extent to which the broad spectrum of research areas are visible online in UK universities. Five broad subject categories are used for research, and inlink counts are used as indicators of online visibility or impact. The approach is designed to give more complete subject coverage than previous studies and to avoid the conceptual difficulties of a page classification approach, although one is used for triangulation. The results suggest that Science and Engineering dominate university Web presences, but with Humanities and Arts also achieving a high presence relative to its size, showing that high Web impact does not have to be restricted to the sciences. Research funding bodies should now consider whether action needs to be taken to ensure that opportunities are not being missed in the lower Web impact areas.

Measuring visibility of disciplines on Chinese academic web

“…Four out of seven broad disciplines are found and the average cohesiveness is 0.91. Engineering and Social Sciences dominate the Chinese university network, which is consistent with studies of the UK web [89,90]. Medicine and Arts are isolated from the main component, and they are cohesive internally and can be visually identified.…”

Webometrics as a method for identifying the most accredited free electronic journals

“…According to the related literature, there are ten webometric applications. They include: web impact factor (WIF) assessment (Ingwersen, 1998;Thelwall, 2001;Smith, 2004;Kousha, 2004;Danesh et al, 2008); website visibility assessment (Vreeland, 2000; EL 33,1 Vaughan and Thelwall, 2005;Gao and Vaughan, 2005;Asnafi and Osareh, 2006;Soheili et al, 2008); investigation of website collaboration (Chu, 2001;Ingwersen and Larsen, 2001;Thelwall and Wilkinson, 2002;Osareh, 2003;Danesh et al, 2008); identification of core websites (Soheili, 2006); mapping the structure of science (Kousha and Thelwall, 2007); search engines assessment (Isfandyari-Moghaddam and Parirokh, 2006;Isfandyari-Moghaddam, 2007;Isfandyari-Moghaddam and Ranjbar, 2008); web page contents analysis (Huizingh, 2000); investigation of users' information seeking behaviour (Sotoudeh, 2003;Thelwall et al, 2005); investigation of the web presence of countries (Thelwall and Price, 2003;Noruzi, 2006b); and discovery of the link creation motivations (Wilkinson et al, 2003;Chu, 2005;Thelwall et al, 2005;Kousha and Thelwall, 2006). Hence, building this study on the related literature, a combination of webometric applications were utilized to determine the most accredited free English EJs in medical sciences.…”

Clustering research group website homepages

“…Science and engineering web pages are dominant in academic institutions websites (Thelwall and Price 2003), particularly computer science related web pages, which are heavily represented in academic websites . As this study is primarily exploratory, the research groups are restricted to only those that are computer science related, because computer science dominates online web presence in university websites compared to other disciplines.…”