Web issue analysis: An integrated water resource management case study

Abstract

In this paper web issue analysis is introduced as a new technique to investigate an issue as reflected on the web. The issue chosen, Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM), is a United Nations-initiated paradigm for managing water resources in an international context, particularly in developing nations. In common with many international governmental initiatives, there is a considerable body of online information about it. 41,381 HTML pages and 28,735 PDF documents mentioning the issue were downloaded. A page URL and link analysis revealed the international and sectoral spread of IWRM. A noun and noun phrase occurrence analysis was used to reveal the issues most commonly discussed, revealing some unexpected topics such as "private sector" and "economic growth". Whilst the complexity of the methods required to produce meaningful statistics from the data are a disadvantage for its easy interpretation, it was still possible to produce data that could be subject to a reasonable intuitive interpretation. Hence web issue analysis is claimed to be a useful new technique for information science.

Extracting accurate and complete results from search engines: Case study windows live

“…Query splitting is a technique previously used to increase the number of URLs returned by a search engine as matching a query (Thelwall, Vann, & Fairclough, 2006; as previously used by Bar-Ilan and Peritz, 2004 and elsewhere on an ad-hoc basis, e.g., http://www.Webmasterworld.com/ forum7/1379.htm from November, 2005). For example, if a search engine reported 2,000 matches for the query "Webometrics," then it would return the just the first 1,000 results (e.g., in 20 pages of 50) and then stop.…”

“…Second, instead of hit count estimates, some Webometrics research requires lists of URLs matching a query, for example if the individual URLs need to be visited or their country of origin determined (Thelwall, Vann, & Fairclough, 2006). This is often problematic because search engines normally stop at about the 1000th result, with all other matching URLs remaining hidden from the user (Jepsen, Seiden, Ingwersen, Björneborn, & Borlund, 2004).…”

Creating an academic landscape of sustainability science: an analysis of the citation network

“…By analyzing this citation network, we can comprehend the structure of a research domain constituting a larger volume of papers than we can read. In previous works, a citationbased approach has been applied to water resource management (Thelwall et al 2006) and ecological economics (Costanza et al 2004;Ma and Stern 2006). The objective of this paper is to provide an academic landscape of sustainability science by using citation network analysis as a computational support tool.…”

Academic landscape of hydropower: citation-analysis-based method and its application

“…However, they do not provide analysis of a global scale or information related to the development of technologies in other countries. Although citation-based approaches have been applied to studies of various fields such as nanotechnology (Li et al, 2007) and water resource management (Thelwall et al, 2006), and although some earlier studies have examined other types of renewable energy such as solar power (Shibata et al, 2010), no similar research has been conducted for hydropower. The major objective of this paper is to grasp the academic landscape of hydropower-related studies and to forecast future development.…”