Fundamental methodologies and tools for the employment of webometric analyses - a discussion and proposal for improving the foundation of webometrics

Abstract

The paper Fundamental methodologies and tools for the employment of webometric analyses defines the most important rules to keep in mind before performing webometric analyses. The paper deals with the two basic elements, that constitutes the foundation for webometric analyses: the documents being analysed, and the tools that are applied for the data collection. The concepts of a citation theory and a link theory are discussed through a study of the current litterature. Different methodologies for uncovering motivations for making references in scientific articles are reviewed and discussed. A methodology for uncovering motivations for making links on webpages is proposed and applied on six researchers' websites at the Royal School of Library and Information Science in Denmark, and on all the institutes at the same institution and at selected institutes at The Technical University of Denmark. The paper further contains a review on the linktopology of the Internet and the current status for the tools available for data collection. Finally, alternative possible tools for applying webometric analyses are proposed. The alternative tools are the Researchindex invented by Lawrence and Giles (Lawrence, Bollacker & Giles, 1999b; Giles, Bollacker & Lawrence, 1998), Kleinberg's HITS algorithm employed in the Clever search engine (The Clever Project, n.d.; Kleinberg, 1998), Proposals for possible extensions to the HTTP protocol to facilitate the collection and navigation of backlink information in the world wide web made by Chakrabarti, Gibson and McCurley (Chakrabarti, Gibson & McCurley, 1999c) and finally Link Agent, a program we have developed for this paper. The program makes it possible to uncover the reciprocal linking webpages, that exist in relation to the outgoing links from a chosen webpage. Keywords: Informetrics, Webometrics, Citation theory, Link theory, Motivations for links, Motivations for references, Search engines, Webometric tools