Interlinking between Asia-Pacific University Web sites

An investigation into the pattern of international interlinking between Asia-Pacific university Web sites is described. AltaVista advanced searches were used for the data collection and network diagrams used to portray the results from four perspectives. It was found that each of the four angles allowed novel interpretations of the data, but that Australia and Japan were nevertheless clearly at the heart of the Web in the region, with Australia being a particularly common target of links and Japan having a more balanced profile of ingoing and outgoing hyperlinks. Interestingly, one of the perspectives mimicked an official grouping of less wealthy countries in the region whilst another contained the more developed countries, with Singapore and Thailand appearing in both. It was hypothesised that the nature of larger Web sites covered was qualitatively different from that of smaller ones, making the deduction of relationships between the hosting institutions difficult from the link counts alone. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A university-centred European Union link analysis

University web sites play an important role in facilitating a wide range of types of communication. This paper reports an analysis of international academic linking in Europe, with particular reference to European Union (EU) integration. The Microsoft search service was used to calculate international interlinking to universities and from universities. Four different web topologies were found for the link structure data and poorly connected countries were identified. The results show the expected EU dominance of the large richer Western European nations, particularly the UK and Germany. The new EU countries are not yet integrated into the EU web but some show strong regional connections.     

National and international university departmental Web site interlinking

Although many link patterns have been identified at the university level, departmental interlinking has been relatively ignored. Universities are multidisciplinary by nature and various disciplines may employ the Web differently, thus patterns identified at the university level may hide subject differences. Departments are typically subject-oriented, and departmental interlinking may therefore illustrate interesting disciplinary linking patterns, perhaps relating to informal scholarly communication. The aim of this paper is to identify whether and how link patterns differ along country and disciplinary lines between similar disciplines and similar countries. Physics, Chemistry and Biology departments in Australia, Canada and the UK have been chosen. In order to get a holistic picture of departments' Web use profiles and link patterns, five different perspectives are identified and compared for each set of departments. Differences in link patterns are identified along both national and disciplinary lines, and are found to reflect offline phenomena. Along national lines, a likely explanation for the difference is that countries with better research performances make more general use of the Web; and, with respect to international peer interlinking, countries that share more scholarly communication tend to interlink more with each other. Along disciplinary lines, it seems that departments from disciplines which are more willing to distribute their research outputs tend to make more general use of the Web, and also interlink more with their national and international peers.     

A method for identifying clusters in sets of interlinking Web spaces

A technique is presented for the identification of patterns from the links between large Web spaces and is applied to data concerning the interlinking of university Web sites in fifteen European countries. This is based upon a procedure for normalising the data so that it can be analysed using standard multivariate statistical techniques and is less susceptible to individual outliers than standard methods. The approach was successfully able to identify clusters of European countries based upon data for their universities' interlinking patterns. For example, the northern countries were differentiated from the southern with this method. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Results of an Extensive Search for "S&T Indicators" on the Web: A Content Analysis

In this study we carried out a content analysis of Web pages containing the search term "S&T indicators", which were located by an extensive search of the Web. Our results clearly show that the Web is a valuable information source on this topic. Major national and international institutions and organizations publish the full text of their reports on the Web, or allow free downloading of these reports in non-html formats. In addition to direct information, a number of pages listing and linking to major reports, programs and organizations were also located.     

The anthrax scare and the Web: A content analysis of Web pages linking to resources on anthrax

Summary The purpose of this study was to develop a method for characterizing the page and linking patterns related to dramatic events on the Web. As a specific case, we characterized Web pages linking to the set of pages on anthrax indexed by the Yahoo directory (generally acknowledged as a high quality directory). The sample of Web pages was collected shortly after anthrax became a matter of widespread concern (November 2001). The findings show that at that time the “typical' source page was either a news item or a page with a list of links. Most of the examined links were not navigational but linked to the target page in order to provide additional content. Many Web sites added hyperlinks to pages providing presumably authoritative and high quality information on anthrax rather than supplying the information themselves. The results show that Web authors link extensively to presumably “high quality' pages. The methods presented here can be utilized in order to characterize pages and linking patterns of Web pages linking to a set of predefined pages, and the findings of this specific study can serve as a basis for comparison.     

Local government web sites in Finland: A geographic and webometric analysis

It has been shown that information collected from and about links between web pages and web sites can reflect real world phenomena and relationships between the organizations they represent. Yet, government linking has not been extensively studied from a webometric point of view. The aim of this study was to increase the knowledge of governmental interlinking and to shed some light on the possible real world phenomena it may indicate. We show that interlinking between local government bodies in Finland follows a strong geographic, or rather a geopolitical pattern and that governmental interlinking is mostly motivated by official cooperation that geographic adjacency has made possible.     

Disciplinary and linguistic considerations for academic Web linking: An exploratory hyperlink mediated study with Mainland China and Taiwan

The Web has become an important means of academic information exchange and can be used to give new insights into patterns of informal scholarly communication. This study develops new methods to examine patterns of university Web linking, focusing on Mainland China and Taiwan, and including language considerations. Multiple exploratory investigations into Web links were conducted between universities in these two places. Firstly, inlinks were counted to each university Web site from its national peers using four alternative Web document models. The results were shown to correlate significantly with research productivity in Taiwan but not in the Mainland, although in the latter case less reliable institutional data could have been the cause. For Taiwan, this is the first evidence of a scholarly association with academic linking for a non-English speaking region. It was then ascertained that the same link counts associated more strongly with scientific than social scientific research productivity in Taiwan. This confirms the general assumption of greater Web use by the hard sciences. We then investigated Taiwan-Mainland university cross-links, and found that although English is extensively used on the Web, there was no evidence that it was the language of preference for informal scholarly communication between the two areas. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Bibliometric analysis of Patent Ductus Arteriosus treatments

A bibliometric analysis was performed to assess the quantitative trend of Patent Ductus Arteriosus (PDA) treatment research, including intravenous injection of indomethacin and surgery. The documents studied were retrieved from the Science Citation Index (SCI) for the period from 1991 to 2002. The publication pattern concerning authorship, collaboration, original countries, citation frequency, document type, language of publication, distribution of journals, page count and the most frequently cited papers were performed. The results indicated that either treatment was not the recent emphasis of PDA research. The publishing countries of both treatments have also denoted that these researches were mostly done in Europe and North America. Both surgery and drug treatments had few international collaboration papers. English was the dominant language, and collaboration of two to six authors was the most popular level of co-authorship. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

International publication patterns in social sciences: A quantitative analysis of theIBSS file

A scientometric analysis of social science literature is tried by using the machine-readable files of theIBSS 1981–1985. This is a comprehensive international bibliography in social sciences including cultural anthropology, economics, political science and sociology. Data used were 40,313 monograph records in theIBSS files. First, the number of scholarly monographs was examined by country. As a result, it is shown that a large number of monographs was published by only a very small number of countries. Second, the number of monographs was examined by language. A similar pattern as that of countries was observed. Third, the relationship between the publishing country and the language used is discussed. It is clarified that some languages, such as English, French and Spanish, are used in many countries because of their historical background such as colonization. Finally, we examined the correlation among the number of published monographs, GDP, population and the number of people attaining a university education. A regression model that incorporates GDP as explanatory variables explains well the variation of the number of monographs by countries (R²=0.77).     

Co-inlinking to a municipal Web space: a webometric and content analysis

It is known that there are significant correlations between linking and geographical patterns. Although interlinking patterns have been studied in various contexts, co-inlinking patterns on the Web have only been studied as indicator of business competitive positions. This research studies the use of co-inlinks to local government Web sites, assesses whether co-inlinking follows geographic patterns and investigates reasons for creating the co-inlinks. Strong evidence was found that co-inlinking is more frequent to municipalities in the same functional region than to municipalities in different functional regions, indicating that this geographic aspect influences co-inlinking, even though geographic co-inlinking was not a strong trend overall. Because the functional regions are created based on cooperation between the municipalities, we have indirectly been able to map cooperation from co-inlinking patterns on the Web. The main reason to create co-inlinking links to municipalities was that the source of the links wanted to show a connection to its region.     

Ontology-based Tamil–English cross-lingual information retrieval system

Cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) systems facilitate users to query for information in one language and retrieve relevant documents in another language. In general, CLIR systems translate query in source language to target language and retrieve documents in target language based on the keywords present in the translated query. However, the presence of ambiguity in source and translated queries reduces the performance of the system. Ontology can be used to address this problem. The current approaches to ontology-based CLIR systems use manually constructed multilingual ontology, which is expensive. However, many methods exist to automatically construct ontology for any domain in English but not in other languages like Tamil. We propose a methodology for Tamil–English CLIR system by translating the Tamil query to English and retrieve pages in English to address these issues. Our approach uses a word sense disambiguation module to resolve the ambiguity in Tamil query. An automatically constructed ontology in English is used to address the ambiguity of English query. We have developed a morphological analyser for Tamil language, Tamil–English bilingual dictionary and named entity database to translate a Tamil query to English. The translated query is reformulated using ontology and the reformulated queries are given to a search engine to retrieve English documents from the Internet. We have evaluated our methodology for agriculture domain and the evaluation results show that our approach outperforms other approaches in terms of precision.     

Some citation-related characteristics of scientific journals published in individual countries

Relationships between publication language, impact factors and self-citations of journals published in individual countries, eight from Europe and one from South America (Brazil), are analyzed using bibliometric data from Thomson Reuters JCR Science Edition databases of ISI Web of Knowledge. It was found that: (1) English-language journals, as a rule, have higher impact factors than non-English-language journals, (2) all countries investigated in this study have journals with very high self-citations but the proportion of journals with high self-citations with reference to the total number of journals published in different countries varies enormously, (3) there are relatively high percentages of low self-citations in high subject-category journals published in English as well as non-English journals but national-language journals have higher self-citations than English-language journals, and (4) irrespective of the publication language, journals devoted to very specialized scientific disciplines, such as electrical and electronic engineering, metallurgy, environmental engineering, surgery, general and internal medicine, pharmacology and pharmacy, gynecology, entomology and multidisciplinary engineering, have high self-citations.     

How old is the Web? Characterizing the age and the currency of the European scientific Web

The aim of this paper is to model and study the age of the Web using a sample of about four million of web pages from the 16 European Research Area countries obtained during 2004 and 2005. Web page time-stamp (date when the web pages were created or last changed for last time), format and size in bytes data have been analysed. Several indicators are introduced to measure longitudinal aspects of the Web. Half-age is proposed as a measure of the age distribution because this is found to be exponential. “Web Update Index” and “Lifespan Index” are introduced to measure the changing rate of a small sample over time. Results show that the British Web space has the youngest Web pages while the Greek and Belgian ones have the oldest. The study also compared Web pages topics and found that Biology pages are more stable than Physics pages.     

Translation equivalence across PISA countries

Due to the continuous increase in the number of countries participating in international comparative assessments such as TIMSS and PISA, ensuring linguistic and cultural equivalence across the various national versions of the assessment instruments has become an increasingly crucial challenge. For example, 58 countries participated in the PISA 2006 Main Study. Within each country, the assessment instruments had to be adapted into each language of instruction used in the sampled schools. All national versions in languages used for 5 per cent or more of the target population (that is, a total of 77 versions in 42 different languages) were verified for equivalence against the English and French source versions developed by the PISA consortium. Information gathered both through the verification process and through empirical analyses of the data are used in order to adjudicate whether the level of linguistic equivalence reached an acceptable standard in each participating country. The paper briefly describes the procedures typically used in PISA to ensure high levels of translation/adaptation accuracy, and then focuses on the development of the set of indicators that are used as criteria in the equivalence adjudication exercise. Empirical data from the PISA 2005 Field Trial are used to illustrate both the analyses and the major conclusions reached.     

Bibliometric analysis of articles published in ISI dental journals, 2007–2011

In recent years there have been few bibliometric evaluations in dental sciences with an international approach. The aim of this study is to describe the scientific production of original and review articles published in ISI dental journals for the period 2007–2011, considering qualitative and quantitative measures across countries. In this study documents indexed in Science Citation Index Expanded of Web of Science were reviewed between January 2007 and December 2011. All “Article” and “Review” document types in the “Dentistry, Oral Medicine and Surgery” category were included. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were performed. A total of 37,571 documents were found for the entire period, growing 24.3 % annually from 2007 to 2011. The publication language was mostly English (98.6 %), and 54.5 % of productivity was concentrated in five countries. A total of 44 countries had at least 100 documents and were included in the analysis, representing 36,532 (97.23 %) documents. It was concluded that increasing productivity in some countries, such as Brazil, China, India, and Turkey, was observed. High levels and stability in terms of impact was determined in the Nordic countries. The USA continues to lead in terms of overall productivity.     

Increasing dominance of English in publications archived by PubMed

English is becoming the international language in numerous fields of human civilization. We sought to evaluate the extent of use of English in the field of biomedical publications. We searched in PubMed for the number of articles written in the 57 indexed languages, during each one of the four past 10-year periods. The extent of use of English as the publication language of articles included in PubMed has gradually risen from 62.3% of the total number of indexed articles between 1967–1976, to 74.0% between 1977–1986, 83.4% between 1987–1996, and reached 89.3% in the period between 1997–2006. The percentage of articles written in each one of the other languages was less than 1.6% for the period of 1997–2006. Apart from English, only the percentage of articles written in Chinese has risen between 1967–1976 and 1997–2006 (from 0.05% to 1.49%). In conclusion, the dominance of English in biomedical publications archived by the most commonly used database is impressive and increasing. This fact may have several consequences, favourable or not, in various aspects of scientific production.     

The “own-language preference”: Measures of relative language self-citation

It has already been pointed out that the foreign language barrier is probably the greatest impediment to the free flow and transfer of information. This barrier is even growing as scientists of more and more countries publish in their own languages. Almost all studies addressing the language barrier problem were conducted from an Anglo-Saxon perspective, limiting their scope to English-language sources or English speakers. Little research has been devoted to studying and measuring language preference among non-English-speaking scholars. This article reviews measures proposed in former studies such as the “relative own-language preference” indicator, and the “straight odds ratio”, pointing out their advantages and drawbacks. Two new refined measures (in both “raw” and normalised versions) are offered, claiming to be free of these drawbacks, and thus enabling a better and more reliable comparison between journals of different languages. Practical use of the proposed measures is illustrated by applying them to findings of a former language-citation study done on nine sociology journals.     

Characteristics of papers published in journals: an analysis of open access journals,country of publication,and languages used

This study explores how the citation of open access (OA) journal articles occurs by analyzing the impact of certain journal characteristics, namely, whether the journal is OA and whether its country of publication is the same as the affiliation of a paper’s author. As the language of a paper is an important factor contributing to paper citations, this study uses papers in English. This analysis included publications from 77 countries from 2010 to 2012. This analysis included 19,530 journals and 3,215,742 papers without duplication. The results showed that papers published in OA and international journals were cited in more countries than non-OA and domestic journals, and a higher percentage of these were being cited by foreign countries. From these findings, it was determined that the more widely accessible OA journals were effectively being accessed by researchers from multiple countries. However, of the top 10% most cited papers in international journals, a higher percentage of these came from non-OA compared to OA journals. Among domestic journals, no such difference was found. Papers published in non-OA international journals were most cited in foreign countries with a large number of published papers. Hence, the effect of OA’s expanded accessibility, while having an apparent effect on heightening the interest of foreign readership, has a limited impact in terms of increasing citations.     

Size of web domains and interlinking behavior of higher education institutions in Europe

The aim of this paper is to empirically test whether interlinking patterns between higher education institutions (HEIs) conform to a document model, where links are motivated by webpage content, or a social relationship model, where they are markers of underlying social relationships between HEIs. To this aim, we analyzed a sample of approximately 400 European HEIs, using the number of pages on their web domains and the total number of links sent and received; in addition we test whether these two characteristics are associated with organizational size, reputation, and the volume of teaching and research activities. Our main findings are as follows: first, the number of webpages of HEI websites is strongly associated with their size, and to a lesser extent, with the volume of their educational activities, research orientation, and reputation; differences between European countries are rather limited, supporting the insight that the academic Web has reached a mature stage. Second, the distribution of connectivity (as measured by the total degree of HEI’s) follows a lognormal distribution typical of social networks between organizations, while counts of weblinks can be predicted with good precision from organizational characteristics. HEIs with larger websites tend to send and receive more links, but the effect is rather limited and does not fundamentally modify the resulting network structure. We conclude that aggregated counts of weblinks between pairs of HEIs are not significantly affected by the web policies of HEIs and thus can be considered as reasonably robust measures. Furthermore, interlinking should be considered as proxies of social relationships between HEIs rather than as reputational measures of the content published on their websites.