Exploring the web visibility of world-class universities

Abstract

With the rapid development of the Internet, there is a need for evaluating the public visibility of universities on the Internet (i.e., web visibility) in terms of its implications for university management, planning, and governance. The data were collected in December 2010 by using Yahoo, one of the most widely used search engines. Specifically, we gathered ''Single Mention'' data to measure the number of times that each university was mentioned on websites. In addition, we collected network-based data on Single Mentions. We obtained another data set based on the 2010 world university rankings by Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). We employed several analytical methods for the analysis, including correlations, nonparametric tests (e.g., the Mann-Whitney test), and multidimensional scaling (MDS). The significant positive correlation between university rankings and web visibility suggests that indicators of web visibility can function as a proxy measure of conventional university rankings. Another distinctive implication can be drawn from the pattern of a disparity in web visibility stemming from the linguistic divide, that is, universities in English-speaking countries dominated the central positions in various network structures of web visibility, whereas those in non-English-speaking countries were located in the periphery of these structures. In this regard, further research linking web visibility to university management, planning, and governance is needed.Keywords Web visibility Á Webometrics Á World university rankings The ''education gospel'' glorifying the key role of education in national economic competitiveness (Grubb and Lazerson 2004) has driven a new international race of higher education over the last decades.

Evolution of the International Hyperlink Network

“…In a recent analysis of the Web visibility of several world-class universities, Lee and Park (2012) also reported that there are many subsystems that make up the world system. One distinctive implication drawn from the academic system is that universities in English-speaking countries dominate the central positions in various Web structures, whereas those in non-English-speaking countries are located on the periphery of these structures.…”

“…During the data collection process, LexiURL (Thelwall, 2009) was used to automatically send numerous scripts to Yahoo and organize the returned data. The same data sets were previously used in different contexts: the ego network of the .com domain (Chung et al, 2014), international online content flow (Choi & Park, 2014), and Rosen et al (2011) Internet hyperlink n/a Lee and Park (2012) Interlink of world class university 2010 Hsu and Park (2012) Authorship, subject topic, website format. 2010 Chung et al (2014) Dotcom web community 2009 Choi and Park (2014) Internet host 2010 Barnett and Park (2014) Internet hyperlink, bandwidth, shared website 2010 Barnett et al (2015) Internet hyperlink, international student flow 2010 Huang and Sun (2015) Homeowner forum n/a Ruiz and Barnett (2015) Ownership of up and downstreams 2011…”

The role of imprinting on the adoption of diversity management in German universities

“…Public visibility may affect alignment with a particular institutional logic as well, and not being included in the Shanghai Ranking does not mean that a university has a bad reputation. Visibility was based on the number of Google hits (in 100,000s) that each university had in June 2016 (see Lee and Park for a similar approach).…”

Influence of the Academic Library on US University Reputation: A Webometric Approach

“…Moreover, some studies have found that web-visibility indicators could function as proxy measures of non-web university rankings, such as Aguillo et al [19] and Lee and Park [20], proving the importance of web performance on reputational and research-focused university rankings.…”