National and international university departmental Web site interlinking

Summary The structural similarity between hyperlinks and citations has encouraged information scientists to apply bibliometric techniques to the Web. University links have been previously validated as a new data source through significant statistical correlations between link and research measures, together with identification of motivations for hyperlink creation at the university level. Many investigations have been conducted for university interlinking, but few for departments. University Web sites are large compared with departmental Web sites, and significant statistical results are more easily obtained. Nevertheless, universities are multidisciplinary by nature and disciplines may employ the Web differently, thus patterns identified at the university level may hide subject differences. This paper validates departmental interlinking, using Physics, Chemistry and Biology departments from Australia, Canada and the UK.     

Linguistic patterns of academic Web use in Western Europe

A survey of linguistic dimensions of Web site hosting and interlinking of the universities of sixteen European countries is described. The results show that English is the dominant language both for linking pages and for all pages. In a typical country approximately half the pages were in English and half in one or more national languages. Normalised interlinking patterns showed three trends: 1) international interlinking throughout Europe in English, and additionally in Swedish in Scandinavia; 2) linking between countries sharing a common language, and 3) countries extensively hosting international links in their own major languages. This provides evidence for the multilingual character of academic use of the Web in Western Europe, at least outside the UK and Eire. Evidence was found that Greece was significantly linguistically isolated from the rest of the EU but that outsiders Norway and Switzerland were not. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Patterns of national and international Web inlinks to US academic departments: An analysis of disciplinary variations

An investigation of links to 89 US academic departments from three different disciplines gave insights into the kinds of international regions and national domains that linked to them. While significant correlations were found between total counts of international inlinks and total publication impact in Psychology and Chemistry, counts of international inlinks to History departments were too small to give a significant result. The correlations suggest that international links may reflect, to a certain extent, patterns of scholarly communication. Even though History departments attracted a significantly lower percentage of international inlinks than those of Chemistry and Psychology, the main source of links for all three disciplines was from Europe. Analyses of national inlinks, characterized by gTLDs (generic Top Level Domains), showed that the major source of links for all disciplines was .edu sites, followed by .com, .org, .net. As a whole, international regional differences in disciplines were stronger than gTLD differences, although in both cases discrepancies were not of a large scale. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A scientometric assessment of the Southern Africa Development Community: science in the tip of Africa

This article reports the results of a scientometric assessment of the Southern Africa Development Community countries. The National Science Indicators database of Thomson-Reuters and the online ISI Web of Knowledge are utilized in order to identify the number of publications of the 15 countries over a period of 15 years; the activity and relative impact indicators of 22 scientific disciplines for each country and their collaborative patterns. It is identified that South Africa with 19% of the population in the region is responsible for 60% of the regional GDP and 79% of the regions publications. All countries tend to have the same focus in their disciplinary priorities and underemphasize disciplines such as engineering, materials science and molecular biology. It is expressed concern that the current research infrastructures are inadequate to assist in reaching the objectives developed in the Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan of the Community.     

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.     

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 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.     

A comparison of disciplinary structure in science between the G7 and the BRIC countries by bibliometric methods

Using a collection of papers gathered from the Web of Science, and defining disciplines by the JCR classification, this paper compares the disciplinary structure of the G7 countries (representing high S&T level countries) and the BRIC countries (representing fast breaking countries in S&T) by using bibliometric methods. It discusses the similarity and the balance of their disciplinary structure. We found that: (1) High S&T level countries have a similar national disciplinary structure; (2) In recent years the disciplinary structure of the BRIC countries has become more and more similar to that of the G7 countries; (3) The disciplinary structure of the G7 countries is more balanced than that of the BRIC countries (4) In the G7 countries more emphasis goes to the life sciences, while BRIC countries focus on physics, chemistry, mathematics and engineering.     

The relationship between the WIFs or inlinks of Computer Science Departments in UK and their RAE ratings or research productivities in 2001

Previous research has shown that Web link based metrics can correlate with traditional research assessment at the university level. In this study, we test whether the same is true for the computer science departments in the UK. The relevant Web Impact Factors (WIFs) were calculated from the link data collected both from AltaVista and the special academic crawler of the University of Wolverhampton. The numbers of staff members and Web pages in each computer science department were used as denominators for the WIFs calculation. The number of inlinks to the computer science departments correlated significantly with their research productivities, and WIFs with numbers of staff members as denominators correlated significantly with their Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) ratings. The number of staff members was confirmed to be a better indicator of departmental size than the number of Web pages within the department's domain. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Citation patterns of Korean physicists and mechanical engineers: Differences by type of publication source and type of authorship

By comparing the citation patterns of Korean researchers in physics and mechanical engineering, this study identifies the extent to which type of publication source (Korean non-SCI, Korean SCI, and international SCI) and type of authorship (purely Korean authors, Korean-foreign co-authors, and foreign-Korean co-authors) influence the choice of sources cited by Korean scientists. Koreans publishing physics or mechanical engineering papers in international SCI journals are more likely to cite articles published in journals of the science mainstream countries (the U.S., the U.K., the Netherlands, and Germany) than articles published in national journals, while Koreans publishing in Korean journals tend to cite articles published in national journals. In terms of authorship, articles published in mainstream journals are more highly cited by internationally co-authored papers than Korean-authored papers in both disciplines. 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.     

Publication patterns in Russia and the West compared

The institutional environment of science differs across countries. Its particularities have an impact on outcomes of scientific enterprise in terms of authorship patterns and patterns of citations. The paper analyzes scholarly papers produced by faculty and graduate students affiliated with six universities, two of them operate in the Russian institutional environment of science and four others??in the Western European and North American. The citation analysis of papers included in two major databases, eLibrary (Russian) and Web of Knowledge (international), shows that the lists of predictors for the number of references to a scholarly article significantly differ in the Western and Russian cases.     

中国高水平高校材料学科专业课程英语化教学必要性探析

"培养具有国际视野的高素质创新人才"和创建国际一流大学已经成为国内一些高水平高校的办学宗旨之一。本文对目前国内一流高校专业英语应用能力培养的必要性进行了分析。针对目前国内高校英语教学主要以通用英语为特征的基本教学模式所存在的问题,结合浙江大学创建国际一流高校、一流学科对本科学生提出的在学期间具有100%的境外访学率以及在学期间对本科生全面展开的研究训练计划(SRTP)培养所伴随的参加国际学术会议、从事与阅读专业外语资料直接相关的学术研究、毕业后具有高出国深造率等基本要求,探讨了专业课程全英文教学的必要性及重要性,并探讨了其对促使所培养的国内学生更好地走出去和让世界各地的学子方便地走进来,以及对推动浙大材料学科更好地向世界一流水准迈进所产生的积极作用。     

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.     

Contradicting incentives for research collaboration

This study describes the Danish publication award system (BFI), investigates whether its built-in incentives have had an effect on publication behavior at the University of Southern Denmark, and discusses the possible future implications on researcher incentives should universities wish to measure BFI on the individual level. We analyzed publication data from the university CRIS system (Pure) and from SciVal. Several studies indicate that co-authored scholarly journal articles attract more citations than single author articles. The reason for this are not clear, however, research collaboration across institutions and countries is commonly accepted in the research community and among university managements as one way of increasing the researcher’s and institution’s reputation and impact. The BFI system is designed to award scholarly publication activity at Danish universities, especially publication in international journals of high status. However, we find that the built-in incentives leave the researcher and his or her institution with a dilemma: If the researchers optimize their performance by forming author groups with external collaborators, the optimal way of doing so for the researchers is not the optimal way seen from the perspective of the university. Our analysis shows that the typical article has 6.5 authors, two of which are internal, and that this has remained stable since the introduction of the BFI. However, there is variation across the disciplines. While ‘the Arts and Humanities’ and ‘the Social Sciences’ seem to compose author groups in a way which does not optimize the performance of the institution, both ‘Health’ and ‘the Natural Sciences’ seem to optimize according to criteria other than those specified in the BFI.     

Disciplinary differences in Twitter scholarly communication

This paper investigates disciplinary differences in how researchers use the microblogging site Twitter. Tweets from selected researchers in ten disciplines (astrophysics, biochemistry, digital humanities, economics, history of science, cheminformatics, cognitive science, drug discovery, social network analysis, and sociology) were collected and analyzed both statistically and qualitatively. The researchers tended to share more links and retweet more than the average Twitter users in earlier research and there were clear disciplinary differences in how they used Twitter. Biochemists retweeted substantially more than researchers in the other disciplines. Researchers in digital humanities and cognitive science used Twitter more for conversations, while researchers in economics shared the most links. Finally, whilst researchers in biochemistry, astrophysics, cheminformatics and digital humanities seemed to use Twitter for scholarly communication, scientific use of Twitter in economics, sociology and history of science appeared to be marginal.     

Has globalization strengthened South Korea’s national research system? National and international dynamics of the Triple Helix of scientific co-authorship relationships in South Korea

We trace the structural patterns of co-authorship between Korean researchers at three institutional types (university, government, and industry) and their international partners in terms of the mutual information generated in these relations. Data were collected from the Web of Science during the period 1968–2009. The traditional Triple-Helix indicator was modified to measure the evolving network of co-authorship relations. The results show that international co-authorship relations have varied considerably over time and with changes in government policies, but most relations have become stable since the early 2000s. In other words, the national publication system of Korea has gained some synergy from R&D internationalization during the 1990s, but the development seems to stagnate particularly at the national level: whereas both university and industrial collaborations are internationalized, the cross-connection within Korea has steadily eroded.     

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.     

The impact of internet resources on scholarly communication: A citation analysis

The quality and credibility of Internet resources has been a concern in scholarly communication. This paper reports a quantitative analysis of the use of Internet resources in journal articles and addresses the concerns for the use of Internet resources scholarly journals articles. We collected the references listed in 35,698 articles from 14 journals published during 1996 to 2005, which resulted in 1,000,724 citations. The citation data was divided into two groups: traditional citations and Web citations, and examined based on frequencies of occurrences by domain and type of Web citation sources. The findings included: (1) The number of Web citations in the journals investigated had been increasing steadily, though the quantity was too small to draw an inclusive conclusion on the data about their impact on scientific research; (2) A great disparity existed among different disciplines in terms of using information on the Web. Applied disciplines and interdisciplinary sciences tended to cite more information on the Web, while classical and experimental disciplines cited little of Web information; (3) The frequency of citations was related to the reputation of the author or the institution issuing the information, and not to the domain or webpage types; and (4) The researchers seemed to lack confidence in Internet resources, and Web information was not as frequently cited as reported in some publications before. The paper also discusses the need for developing a guideline system to evaluate Web resources regarding their authority and quality that lies in the core of credibility of Web information.     

Interdisciplinarity and insularity in the diffusion of knowledge: an analysis of disciplinary boundaries between philosophy of science and the sciences

Two fundamentally different perspectives on knowledge diffusion dominate debates about academic disciplines. On the one hand, critics of disciplinary research and education have argued that disciplines are isolated silos, within which specialists pursue inward-looking and increasingly narrow research agendas. On the other hand, critics of the silo argument have demonstrated that researchers constantly import and export ideas across disciplinary boundaries. These perspectives have different implications for how knowledge diffuses, how intellectuals gain and lose status within their disciplines, and how intellectual reputations evolve within and across disciplines. We argue that highly general claims about the nature of disciplinary boundaries are counterproductive, and that research on the nature of specific disciplinary boundaries is more useful. To that end, this paper uses a novel publication and citation network dataset and statistical models of citation networks to test hypotheses about the boundaries between philosophy of science and 11 disciplinary clusters. Specifically, we test hypotheses about whether engaging with and being cited by scientific communities outside philosophy of science has an impact on one’s position within philosophy of science. Our results suggest that philosophers of science produce interdisciplinary scholarship, but they tend not to cite work by other philosophers when it is published in journals outside of their discipline. Furthermore, net of other factors, receiving citations from other disciplines has no meaningful impact—positive or negative—on citations within philosophy of science. We conclude by considering this evidence for simultaneous interdisciplinarity and insularity in terms of scientific trading theory and other work on disciplinary boundaries and communication.