Search (41 results, page 2 of 3)

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Abstract

Ethical aspects of the employment of Web crawlers for information science research and other contexts are reviewed. The difference between legal and ethical uses of communications technologies is emphasized as well as the changing boundary between ethical and unethical conduct. A review of the potential impacts on Web site owners is used to underpin a new framework for ethical crawling, and it is argued that delicate human judgment is required for each individual case, with verdicts likely to change over time. Decisions can be based upon an approximate cost-benefit analysis, but it is crucial that crawler owners find out about the technological issues affecting the owners of the sites being crawled in order to produce an informed assessment.

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Abstract

Hyperlink patterns between Canadian university Web sites were analyzed by a mathematical modeling approach. A multiple regression model was developed which shows that faculty quality and the language of the university are important predictors for links to a university Web site. Higher faculty quality means more links. French universities received lower numbers of links to their Web sites than comparable English universities. Analysis of interlinking between pairs of universities also showed that English universities are advantaged. Universities are more likely to link to each other when the geographical distance between them is less than 3000 km, possibly reflecting the east vs. west divide that exists in Canadian society.

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Abstract

The graph structures of three national university publicly indexable Webs from Australia, New Zealand, and the UK were analyzed. Strong scale-free regularities for page indegrees, outdegrees, and connected component sizes were in evidence, resulting in power laws similar to those previously identified for individual university Web sites and for the AItaVista-indexed Web. Anomalies were also discovered in most distributions and were tracked down to root causes. As a result, resource driven Web sites and automatically generated pages were identified as representing a significant break from the assumptions of previous power law models. It follows that attempts to track average Web linking behavior would benefit from using techniques to minimize or eliminate the impact of such anomalies.

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Abstract

There has been much recent interest in extracting information from collections of Web links. One tool that has been used is Ingwersen's Web impact factor. It has been demonstrated that several versions of this metric can produce results that correlate with research ratings of British universities showing that, despite being a measure of a purely Internet phenomenon, the results are susceptible to a wider interpretation. This paper addresses the question of which is the best possible domain to count backlinks from, if research is the focus of interest. WIFs for British universities calculated from several different source domains are compared, primarily the .edu, .ac.uk and .uk domains, and the entire Web. The results show that all four areas produce WIFs that correlate strongly with research ratings, but that none produce incontestably superior figures. It was also found that the WIF was less able to differentiate in more homogeneous subsets of universities, although positive results are still possible.

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Abstract

Link analysis in various forms is now an established technique in many different subjects, reflecting the perceived importance of links and of the Web. A critical but very difficult issue is how to interpret the results of social science link analyses. lt is argued that the dynamic nature of the Web, its lack of quality control, and the online proliferation of copying and imitation mean that methodologies operating within a highly positivist, quantitative framework are ineffective. Conversely, the sheer variety of the Web makes application of qualitative methodologies and pure reason very problematic to large-scale studies. Methodology triangulation is consequently advocated, in combination with a warning that the Web is incapable of giving definitive answers to large-scale link analysis research questions concerning social factors underlying link creation. Finally, it is claimed that although theoretical frameworks are appropriate for guiding research, a Theory of Link Analysis is not possible.

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Abstract

In this article Web issue analysis is introduced as a new technique to investigate an issue as reflected on the Web. The issue chosen, integrated water resource management (IWRM), is a United Nations-initiated paradigm for managing water resources in an international context, particularly in developing nations. As with many international governmental initiatives, there is a considerable body of online information about it: 41.381 hypertext markup language (HTML) pages and 28.735 PDF documents mentioning the issue were downloaded. A page uniform resource locator (URL) and link analysis revealed the international and sectoral spread of IWRM. A noun and noun phrase occurrence analysis was used to identify the issues most commonly discussed, revealing some unexpected topics such as private sector and economic growth. Although the complexity of the methods required to produce meaningful statistics from the data is disadvantageous to easy interpretation, it was still possible to produce data that could be subject to a reasonably intuitive interpretation. Hence Web issue analysis is claimed to be a useful new technique for information science.

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Abstract

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to claim that it is useful to assess the web connectivity of research groups, describe hyperlink-based techniques to achieve this and present brief details of European life sciences research groups as a case study. Design/methodology/approach - A commercial search engine was harnessed to deliver hyperlink data via its automatic query submission interface. A special purpose link analysis tool, LexiURL, then summarised and graphed the link data in appropriate ways. Findings - Webometrics can provide a wide range of descriptive information about the international connectivity of research groups. Research limitations/implications - Only one field was analysed, data was taken from only one search engine, and the results were not validated. Practical implications - Web connectivity seems to be particularly important for attracting overseas job applicants and to promote research achievements and capabilities, and hence we contend that it can be useful for national and international governments to use webometrics to ensure that the web is being used effectively by research groups. Originality/value - This is the first paper to make a case for the value of using a range of webometric techniques to evaluate the web presences of research groups within a field, and possibly the first "applied" webometrics study produced for an external contract.

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Abstract

Commercial search engines are now playing an increasingly important role in Web information dissemination and access. Of particular interest to business and national governments is whether the big engines have coverage biased towards the US or other countries. In our study we tested for national biases in three major search engines and found significant differences in their coverage of commercial Web sites. The US sites were much better covered than the others in the study: sites from China, Taiwan and Singapore. We then examined the possible technical causes of the differences and found that the language of a site does not affect its coverage by search engines. However, the visibility of a site, measured by the number of links to it, affects its chance to be covered by search engines. We conclude that the coverage bias does exist but this is due not to deliberate choices of the search engines but occurs as a natural result of cumulative advantage effects of US sites on the Web. Nevertheless, the bias remains a cause for international concern.

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Abstract

Word usage is of interest to linguists for its own sake as well as to social scientists and others who seek to track the spread of ideas, for example, in public debates over political decisions. The historical evolution of language can be analyzed with the tools of corpus linguistics through evolving corpora and the Web. But word usage statistics can only be gathered for known words. In this article, techniques are described and tested for identifying new words from the Web, focusing on the case when the words are related to a topic and have a hybrid form with a common sequence of letters. The results highlight the need to employ a combination of search techniques and show the wide potential of hybrid word family investigations in linguistics and social science.

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Abstract

Web impact factors, the proposed web equivalent of impact factors for journals, can be calculated by using search engines. It has been found that the results are problematic because of the variable coverage of search engines as well as their ability to give significantly different results over short periods of time. The fundamental problem is that although some search engines provide a functionality that is capable of being used for impact calculations, this is not their primary task and therefore they do not give guarantees as to performance in this respect. In this paper, a bespoke web crawler designed specifically for the calculation of reliable WIFs is presented. This crawler was used to calculate WIFs for a number of UK universities, and the results of these calculations are discussed. The principal findings were that with certain restrictions, WIFs can be calculated reliably, but do not correlate with accepted research rankings owing to the variety of material hosted on university servers. Changes to the calculations to improve the fit of the results to research rankings are proposed, but there are still inherent problems undermining the reliability of the calculation. These problems still apply if the WIF scores are taken on their own as indicators of the general impact of any area of the Internet, but with care would not apply to online journals.

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Abstract

In recent years, a considerable body of Webometric research has used hyperlinks to generate indicators for the impact of Web documents and the organizations that created them. The relationship between this Web impact and other, offline impact indicators has been explored for entire universities, departments, countries, and scientific journals, but not yet for individual scientists-an important omission. The present research closes this gap by investigating factors that may influence the Web impact (i.e., inlink counts) of scientists' personal homepages. Data concerning 456 scientists from five scientific disciplines in six European countries were analyzed, showing that both homepage content and personal and institutional characteristics of the homepage owners had significant relationships with inlink counts. A multivariate statistical analysis confirmed that full-text articles are the most linked-to content in homepages. At the individual homepage level, hyperlinks are related to several offline characteristics. Notable differences regarding total inlinks to scientists' homepages exist between the scientific disciplines and the countries in the sample. There also are both gender and age effects: fewer external inlinks (i.e., links from other Web domains) to the homepages of female and of older scientists. There is only a weak relationship between a scientist's recognition and homepage inlinks and, surprisingly, no relationship between research productivity and inlink counts. Contrary to expectations, the size of collaboration networks is negatively related to hyperlink counts. Some of the relationships between hyperlinks to homepages and the properties of their owners can be explained by the content that the homepage owners put on their homepage and their level of Internet use; however, the findings about productivity and collaborations do not seem to have a simple, intuitive explanation. Overall, the results emphasize the complexity of the phenomenon of Web linking, when analyzed at the level of individual pages.

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Date

4.12.2006 12:12:22

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Abstract

In 2007, the social networking Web site MySpace apparently overthrew Google as the most visited Web site for U.S. Web users. If this heralds a new era of widespread online social networking, then it is important to investigate user behaviour and attributes. Although there has been some research into social networking already, basic demographic data is essential to set previous results in a wider context and to give insights to researchers, marketers and developers. In this article, the demographics of MySpace members are explored through data extracted from two samples of 15,043 and 7,627 member profiles. The median declared age of users was surprisingly high at 21, with a small majority of females. The analysis confirmed some previously reported findings and conjectures about social networking, for example, that female members tend to be more interested in friendship and males more interested in dating. In addition, there was some evidence of three different friending dynamics, oriented towards close friends, acquaintances, or strangers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, female and younger members had more friends than others, and females were more likely to maintain private profiles, but both males and females seemed to prefer female friends, with this tendency more marked in females for their closest friend. The typical MySpace user is apparently female, 21, single, with a public profile, interested in online friendship and logging on weekly to engage with a mixed list of mainly female friends who are predominantly acquaintances.

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Abstract

Interdisciplinary collaboration is a major goal in research policy. This study uses citation analysis to examine diverse subjects in the Web of Science and Scopus to ascertain whether, in general, research published in journals classified in more than one subject is more highly cited than research published in journals classified in a single subject. For each subject, the study divides the journals into two disjoint sets called Multi and Mono. Multi consists of all journals in the subject and at least one other subject whereas Mono consists of all journals in the subject and in no other subject. The main findings are: (a) For social science subject categories in both the Web of Science and Scopus, the average citation levels of articles in Mono and Multi are very similar; and (b) for Scopus subject categories within life sciences, health sciences, and physical sciences, the average citation level of Mono articles is roughly twice that of Multi articles. Hence, one cannot assume that in general, multidisciplinary research will be more highly cited, and the converse is probably true for many areas of science. A policy implication is that, at least in the sciences, multidisciplinary researchers should not be evaluated by citations on the same basis as monodisciplinary researchers.

Object

Web of Science

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Abstract

Purpose - The purpose of this research is to investigate general patterns of tag usage and determines the usefulness of the tags used within university image groups to the wider Flickr community. There has been a significant rise in the use of Web 2.0 social network web sites and online applications in recent years. One of the most popular is Flickr, an online image management application. Design/methodology/approach - This study uses a webometric data collection, classification and informetric analysis. Findings - The results show that members of university image groups tend to tag in a manner that is of use to users of the system as a whole rather than merely for the tag creator. Originality/value - This paper gives a valuable insight into the tagging practices of image groups in Flickr.

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Abstract

Webometrics, the quantitative study of Web phenomena, is a field encompassing contributions from information science, computer science, and statistical physics. Its methodology draws especially from bibliometrics. This special issue presents contributions that both push for ward the field and illustrate a wide range of webometric approaches.

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Abstract

Although designed for general Web searching, Webometrics and related research commercial search engines are also used to produce estimated hit counts or lists of URLs matching a query. Unfortunately, however, they do not return all matching URLs for a search and their hit count estimates are unreliable. In this article, we assess whether it is possible to obtain complete lists of matching URLs from Windows Live, and whether any of its hit count estimates are robust. As part of this, we introduce two new methods to extract extra URLs from search engines: automated query splitting and automated domain and TLD searching. Both methods successfully identify additional matching URLs but the findings suggest that there is no way to get complete lists of matching URLs or accurate hit counts from Windows Live, although some estimating suggestions are provided.

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Abstract

Those seeking information from the Internet often start from a search engine, using either its organised directory structure or its text query facility. In response to the difficulty in identifying the most relevant pages for some information needs, many search engines offer Boolean text matching and some, including Google, AltaVista and HotBot, offer the facility to integrate additional information into a more advanced request. Amongst web users, however, it is known that the employment of complex enquiries is far from universal, with very short queries being the norm. It is demonstrated that the gap between the provision of advanced search facilities and their use can be bridged, for specific information needs, by the construction of a simple interface in the form of a website that automatically formulates the necessary requests. It is argued that this kind of resource, perhaps employing additional knowledge domain specific information, is one that could be useful for websites or portals of common interest groups. The approach is illustrated by a website that enables a user to search the individual websites of university level institutions in European Union associated countries.

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Abstract

Search engines are normally used to find information or Web sites, but Webometric investigations use them for quantitative data such as the number of pages matching a query and the international spread of those pages. For this type of application, the accuracy of the hit count estimates and range of URLs in the full results are important. Here, we compare the applications programming interfaces of Google, Yahoo!, and Live Search for 1,587 single word searches. The hit count estimates were broadly consistent but with Yahoo! and Google, reporting 5-6 times more hits than Live Search. Yahoo! tended to return slightly more matching URLs than Google, with Live Search returning significantly fewer. Yahoo!'s result URLs included a significantly wider range of domains and sites than the other two, and there was little consistency between the three engines in the number of different domains. In contrast, the three engines were reasonably consistent in the number of different top-level domains represented in the result URLs, although Yahoo! tended to return the most. In conclusion, quantitative results from the three search engines are mostly consistent but with unexpected types of inconsistency that users should be aware of. Google is recommended for hit count estimates but Yahoo! is recommended for all other Webometric purposes.