Web impact factors for Iranian Universities

Abstract

This study investigates the Web Impact Factors (WIFs) for Iranian universities and introduces a new system of measurement. Counts of links to the web sites of Iranian universities were calculated from the output of AltaVista search engine. The WIFs for Iranian universities were calculated by dividing link page counts by the number of pages found in AltaVista for each university at a given point in time. These WIFs were then compared, to study the impact, visibility, and influence of Iranian university web sites. Overall, Iranian university web sites have a low inlink WIF. While specific features of sites may affect an institution's Web Impact Factor, there is a significant correlation between the proportion of English-language pages at an institution's site and the institution's backlink counts. This indicates that for linguistic reasons, Iranian (Persian-language) web sites may not attract the attention they deserve from the World Wide Web. This raises the possibility that information may be ignored due to linguistic and geographic barriers, and this should be taken into account in the development of the global Web.