A microscopic link analysis of academic institutions within a country — the case of Israel

Links analysis proved to be very fruitful on the Web. Google's very successful ranking algorithm is based on link analysis. There are only a few studies that analyzed links qualitatively, most studies are quantitative. Our purpose was to characterize these links in order to gain a better understanding why links are created. We limited the study to the academic environment, and as a specific case we chose to characterize the interlinkage between the eight Israeli universities. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.