Motivations for academic web site interlinking: evidence for the Web as a novel source of information on informal scholarly communication

Abstract

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.

Readers' perceptions of authors' citation behaviour

“…The nature of the reasons also varies, although to a lesser extent than might seem apparent on first glance since careful inspection of the studies cited above reveals a considerable degree of overlap. Overviews of citation behaviour have been presented by Bornmann and Daniel (2006), Liu (1993) and White (2004), and there have also been reports of the development of analogous classification schemes to facilitate studies of the reasons for the linking of pairs of websites (Chu, 2005;Wilkinson et al, 2003).…”

“…In the first, direct approach, authors are asked why they included each of the citations in their publications. Such studies can be problematic since it may be difficult to obtain an author's co-operation or an author may not be able to remember the rationale for a citation if the publication is at all old (Wilkinson et al, 2003). In the second, indirect approach, the rationale is obtained from careful reading by a non-author of the text that contains and relates to the citation under study.…”

Teaching and Learning on the World Wide Web: Biological Evolution/Webden Öğrenme ve Öğretim: Biyolojik Evrim Konusu

“…However; it is observed that the websites reviewed have lots of shortcomings. Such shortcomings were encountered in the literature, and they should be eliminated (Leonard, 1999;Mashhadi and Han, 1996;Wilkinson, Harries, Thelwall and Price, 2003).…”

“…Despite analyses for websites addressing a considerable mass of topics, to what extent websites present scientific information to students is not clear. It is commonly believed that websites employed in teaching biology in United States do not conform to the national standards for science education (Wilkinson, Harries, Thelwall and Price, 2003).…”

Substance without citation: evaluating the online impact of grey literature

“…The classification scheme should be constructed inductively, perhaps starting with an initial list of relevant classes and expanding the list to incorporate new unanticipated contexts. The classes and genres should be chosen to reflect the objectives of the investigation as well as the types of pages found online (Neuendorf, 2002;Wilkinson, Harries, Thelwall, & Price, 2003).…”