Webometric analysis of departments of librarianship and information science: a follow-up study

Abstract

This paper reports an analysis of the websites of UK departments of library and information science. Inlink counts of these websites revealed no statistically significant correlation with the quality of the research carried out by these departments, as quantified using departmental grades in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise and citations in Google Scholar to publications submitted for that Exercise. Reasons for this lack of correlation include: difficulties in disambiguating departmental websites from larger institutional structures; the relatively small amount of researchrelated material in departmental websites; and limitations in the ways that current Web search engines process linkages to URLs. It is concluded that departmental-level webometric analyses do not at present provide an appropriate technique for evaluating academic research quality, and, more generally, that standards are needed for the formatting of URLs if inlinks are to become firmly established as a tool for website analysis.Keywords: Citation analysis; Research Assessment Exercise; Webometrics IntroductionCitation analysis has been used for many years to probe a range of phenomena in the information sciences, such as mapping the development of novel research areas, identifying the formal and informal links between researchers in a subject, and assessing research impact [1][2][3][4]. The advent of the Web soon led to the suggestion that "sitations" or "inlinks", i.e., links between Web sites, could be used in much the same way as conventional bibliographic citations [5,6], these early studies leading to the concept of webometrics [7][8][9].Citation analyses have been carried out at multiple levels, with studies of the numbers of citations to individuals, research groups, departments, institutions and even to countries. Similar approaches were rapidly developed for the analysis of inlink data [10]. An early such study was that of Thomas and Willett [11], who 1 Correspondence to Peter Willett, Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield, 211 Portobello Street, Sheffield S1 4DP, United Kingdom, p.willett@sheffield.ac.uk.Journal of Information Science, XX (X) 2007, pp. 1-11 © CILIP, DOI: 10.1177/0165551506nnnnnn 2 investigated the websites of 14 library and information science (LIS) departments in the UK. This investigation, hereafter the Thomas study, included an attempt to correlate the number of inlinks to a department's website with that department's research quality, as evidenced by the grade that it achieved in the 1996 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) [12]. The RAE is a regular review of the research activities of every department in every university in the UK, and it provides one of the principal determinants for the allocation of governmental funding to higher education institutions. The RAE is based on extensive peer review and results in each department achieving a numeric grade, the top grade representing "Quality that equates to attainable levels of international excellence in more than half of the resea...

A bibliometric chronicling of library and information science's first hundred years

“…Other artifacts that have been analyzed include highly cited articles (Blessinger & Hrycaj, ), conference proceedings (e.g., Smeaton, Keogh, Gurrin, McDonald, & Kodring, ), websites (Vaughan & Thelwall, ; Arakaki & Willett, ), and theses (Sugimoto, ; Sugimoto, Li, Russell, Finlay, & Ding, ; Sugimoto, Ni, Russell, & Bychowski, ; Keat & Kiran, ; Gao, Yu, & Luo, ; Buttlar, ). Acknowledgments have also received attention, with studies noting an increase in the frequency of LIS articles containing acknowledgments to colleagues, trusted assessors, technicians, and funding agencies (Cronin, ; Cronin & Shaw, ; Harter & Hooten, ; Zhao, ).…”

U.S. academic libraries: understanding their web presence and their relationship with economic indicators

“…In the United States and Canada, Ortega and Aguillo (2009b) have carried out notable work in analyzing US universities. Particular university units such as departments of librarianship and information science have been explored by Arakaki and Willet (2009), and Chu and Thelwall (2002). If we focus on academic libraries, we can observe that several researchers have studied the information architecture, the Web 2.0 phenomenon, and web usability within academic library websites (Harinarayana and Raju 2010;Alton et.…”

“…In the United States and Canada, Ortega and Aguillo (2009b) have carried out notable work in analyzing US universities. Particular university units such as departments of librarianship and information science have been explored by Arakaki and Willet (2009), and Chu and Thelwall (2002).…”

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

“…Particular university units (such as departments) have been also explored by Arakaki and Willet [22] and Chu, He, and Thelwall [23], among others.…”