The need to understand authors’ motivations for creating links between university web sites is addressed by a survey of a random collection of 414 such links from the ac.uk domain. A classification scheme was created and applied to this collection. Obtaining inter-classifier agreement as to the single main link creation cause was very difficult because of multiple potential motivations and the fluidity of genre on the Web. Nevertheless, it was clear that, whilst the vast majority, over 90%, was created for broadly scholarly reasons, only two were equivalent to journal citations. It is concluded that academic web link metrics will be dominated by a range of informal types of scholarly communication. Since formal communication can be extensively studied through citation analysis, this provides an exciting new window through which to investigate a facet of a previously obscured type of communication activity.

Results from recent advances in link metrics have demonstrated that the hyperlink structure of national university systems can be strongly related to the research productivity of the individual institutions. This paper uses a page categorization to show that restricting the metrics to subsets more closely related to the research of the host university can produce even stronger associations. A partial overlap was also found between the effects of applying advanced document models and separating page types, but the best results were achieved through a combination of the two.

Hyperlinks between academic web sites, like citations, can potentially be used to map disciplinary structures and identify evidence of connections between disciplines. In this paper we classified a sample of links originating in three different disciplines: maths, physics and sociology. Links within a discipline were found to be different in character to links between pages in different disciplines. There were also disciplinary differences in both types of link. As a consequence, we argue that interpretations of web science maps covering multiple disciplines will need to be sensitive to the contexts of the links mapped

The quality and impact of academic Web sites is of interest to many audiences, including the scholars who use them and Web educators who need to identify best practice. Several large-scale European Union research projects have been funded to build new indicators for online scientific activity, reflecting recognition of the importance of the Web for scholarly communication. In this paper we address the key question of whether higher rated scholars produce higher impact Web sites, using the United Kingdom as a case study and measuring scholars' quality in terms of university-wide average research ratings. Methodological issues concerning the measurement of the online impact are discussed, leading to the adoption of counts of links to a university's constituent single domain Web sites from an aggregated counting metric. The findings suggest that universities with higher rated scholars produce significantly more Web content but with a similar average online impact. Higher rated scholars therefore attract more total links from their peers, but only by being more prolific, refuting earlier suggestions. It can be surmised that general Web publications are very different from scholarly journal articles and conference papers, for which scholarly quality does associate with citation impact. This has important implications for the construction of new Web indicators, for example that online impact should not be used to assess the quality of small groups of scholars, even within a single discipline

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.