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Can Personal Web Pages that Link to Universities Yield Information about the Wider Dissemination of Research?

School of Computing and Information Technology, University of Wolverhampton, UK, m.thelwall{at}wlv.ac.uk

Gareth Harries

School of Computing and Information Technology, University of Wolverhampton, UK

The growth of the Web has made available a vast collection of informal publishing by individual citizens who previously would not have had access to a media outlet to express their opinions. We investigate personal pages to see whether these are capable of giving new insights into the relationship between the public and universities. A collection of 2763 personal pages hosted by private Internet Service Providers that link to the UK academic domain was investigated. On a macro level there was a clear pattern for universities with higher research productivity to attract more links from personal pages but manual inspection of a random sample showed that this was not directly caused by their research content. Reasons found for linking were varied, with over a quarter associated with purely recreational activities. The results indicate that at present global counts of links from personal home pages can be used for (a) triangulation purposes to confirm patterns found in inter-university links and (b) to assess the embedding of academics (but not their research) in the wider community. They should not be used to assess the dissemination of research to the public, however, without first classifying link targets. The 19% of pages linking to research nevertheless illustrate the wide potential range of uses that different sectors of society can make of online academic research, and indicate that useful public-university relationship information may be found for individual high-profile topical issues.

Key Words: internet • world wide web • research web sites • university web sites • personal home pages • personal web sites • citation linking • citation rankings • research dissemination • impact analysis

Journal of Information Science, Vol. 30, No. 3, 240-253 (2004)
DOI: 10.1177/0165551504044669


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