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Webometric analysis of departments of librarianship and information science: a follow-up studyUniversity of Sheffield, UK
University of Sheffield, UK, p.willett{at}sheffield.ac.uk This paper reports an analysis of the websites of UK departments of library and information science. Inlink counts of these websites revealed no statistically significant correlation with the quality of the research carried out by these departments, as quantified using departmental grades in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise and citations in Google Scholar to publications submitted for that exercise. Reasons for this lack of correlation include: difficulties in disambiguating departmental websites from larger institutional structures; the relatively small amount of research-related material in departmental websites; and limitations in the ways that current web search engines process linkages to URLs. It is concluded that departmental-level webometric analyses do not at present provide an appropriate technique for evaluating academic research quality, and, more generally, that standards are needed for the formatting of URLs if inlinks are to become firmly established as a tool for website analysis.
Key Words: citation analysis • Research Assessment Exercise • webometrics
This version was published on April
1, 2009 Journal of Information Science, Vol. 35, No. 2,
143-152 (2009) |
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