Webometrics

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The science of webometrics (also cybermetrics) tries to measure the World Wide Web to get knowledge about the number and types of hyperlinks, structure of the World Wide Web and usage patterns. According to Björneborn and Ingwersen (2004), the definition of webometrics is "the study of the quantitative aspects of the construction and use of information resources, structures and technologies on the Web drawing on bibliometric and informetric approaches." The term webometrics was first coined by Almind and Ingwersen (1997).

Similar scientific fields are Bibliometrics, Informetrics, Scientometrics, Virtual ethnography, and Web mining.

Since 2004 the Webometrics ranking of world universities is offering information about more than 3,000 universities ranked according to indicators measuring web presence and impact.

One relatively straightforward measure is the "Web Impact Factor" (WIF) introduced by Ingwersen (1998). The WIF measure may be defined as the number of web pages in a web site receiving links from other web sites, divided by the number of web pages published in the site that are accessible to the crawler. According to Noruzi (2006), the WIF measure is considered to work well only within a single country's webosphere, using a single language and a single subject field.

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[edit] References

Tomas C. Almind and Peter Ingwersen (1997). "Informetric analyses on the World Wide Web: Methodological approaches to 'webometrics'". Journal of Documentation 53 (4): 404-426.

Lennart Björneborn and Peter Ingwersen (2004). "Toward a basic framework for webometrics". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 55 (14): 1216-1227.