http://hdl.handle.net/2436/6309 null Tue, 21 May 2013 09:46:08 GMT 2013-05-21T09:46:08Z http://hdl.handle.net/2436/27518 Title: Graph structure in three national academic Webs: Power laws with anomalies Authors: Thelwall, Mike; Wilkinson, David Abstract: The graph structures of three national university publicly indexable Webs from Australia, New Zealand, and the UK were analyzed. Strong scale-free regularities for page indegrees, outdegrees, and connected component sizes were in evidence, resulting in power laws similar to those previously identified for individual university Web sites and for the AltaVista-indexed Web. Anomalies were also discovered in most distributions and were tracked down to root causes. As a result, resource driven Web sites and automatically generated pages were identified as representing a significant break from the assumptions of previous power law models. It follows that attempts to track average Web linking behavior would benefit from using techniques to minimize or eliminate the impact of such anomalies. Wed, 01 Jan 2003 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/2436/27518 2003-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/2436/27375 Title: Finding similar academic Web sites with links, bibliometric couplings and colinks Authors: Thelwall, Mike; Wilkinson, David Abstract: A common task in both Webmetrics and Web information retrieval is to identify a set of Web pages or sites that are similar in content. In this paper we assess the extent to which links, colinks and couplings can be used to identify similar Web sites. As an experiment, a random sample of 500 pairs of domains from the UK academic Web were taken and human assessments of site similarity, based upon content type, were compared against ratings for the three concepts. The results show that using a combination of all three gives the highest probability of identifying similar sites, but surprisingly this was only a marginal improvement over using links alone. Another unexpected result was that high values for either colink counts or couplings were associated with only a small increased likelihood of similarity. The principal advantage of using couplings and colinks was found to be greater coverage in terms of a much larger number of pairs of sites being connected by these measures, instead of increased probability of similarity. In information retrieval terminology, this is improved recall rather than improved precision. Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/2436/27375 2004-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/2436/27374 Title: Three target document range metrics for university web sites Authors: Thelwall, Mike; Wilkinson, David Abstract: Three new metrics are introduced that measure the range of use of a university Web site by its peers through different heuristics for counting links targeted at its pages. All three give results that correlate significantly with the research productivity of the target institution. The directory range model, which is based upon summing the number of distinct directories targeted by each other university, produces the most promising results of any link metric yet. Based upon an analysis of changes between models, it is suggested that range models measure essentially the same quantity as their predecessors but are less susceptible to spurious causes of multiple links and are therefore more robust. Wed, 01 Jan 2003 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/2436/27374 2003-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/2436/27337 Title: Motivations for academic web site interlinking: evidence for the Web as a novel source of information on informal scholarly communication Authors: Wilkinson, David; Harries, Gareth; Thelwall, Mike; Price, Liz Abstract: The need to understand authors’ motivations for creating links between university web sites is addressed by a survey of a random collection of 414 such links from the ac.uk domain. A classification scheme was created and applied to this collection. Obtaining inter-classifier agreement as to the single main link creation cause was very difficult because of multiple potential motivations and the fluidity of genre on the Web. Nevertheless, it was clear that, whilst the vast majority, over 90%, was created for broadly scholarly reasons, only two were equivalent to journal citations. It is concluded that academic web link metrics will be dominated by a range of informal types of scholarly communication. Since formal communication can be extensively studied through citation analysis, this provides an exciting new window through which to investigate a facet of a previously obscured type of communication activity. Wed, 01 Jan 2003 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/2436/27337 2003-01-01T00:00:00Z