Motivations for hyperlinking in scholarly electronic articles: A qualitative study

Abstract

The primary purpose of the study was to identify motivations for hyperlinking in scholarly electronic articles. Fifteen Indiana University faculty and graduate students who had published at least one scholarly electronic article containing at least one external hyperlink were surveyed. Through a series of qualitative interviews, 19 different hyperlinking motivations, classified into the three motivational groups—scholarly, social, and technological—along the dimensional ranges of their properties, were identified. The vast majority of the hyperlinks were attributed to more than one motivation by the authors. The empirical findings of the study demonstrated that scholars use hyperlinks for a variety of purposes, and that their hyperlinking behavior frequently results from a complex interplay of motivations.

Extracting macroscopic information from Web links

“…Aside from technical issues about the reliability of the counting process, the motivations of a researcher in creating a link in their Web site to another research-related page are likely to be at least as diverse as those for e-journal citations. These are, in turn, more diverse than those for print journal citations (Kim, 2000). To ascertain precisely what is being measured, it would be necessary to conduct a thorough investigation of motivation for the creation of research-related hyperlinks, including the development of a precise definition of this concept.…”

“…The causes for concern over the reliability of traditional citation counts are numerous, but include their use for criticism of previous work (Case & Higgins, 2000) and that the figures are a potential source of manipulation (Gowrishankar, Divakar, Baylis, Gravenor, & Kao, 1999). With refereed online journals, moreover, new motivations for referencing can be ascertained that have not been observed in traditional journals (Kim, 2000). These include convenience in accessing material and the desire to link to illustrative graphics.…”

Fronteiras da Ciência da Informação

“…Segundo Kim (2000), embora o FIW tenha surgido como uma analogia ao JIF, as motivações que geram os links são de natureza muito mais subjetiva que aquelas por trás das citações.…”

A research and institutional size‐based model for national university Web site interlinking

“…The majority of previous research into web link metrics has focussed on sites with academic content: university web sites (Smith, 1999;Darmoni et al, 2000;Thelwall, 2000;Thomas & Willet, 2000;Vreeland, 2000;Thelwall, 2001d;Thelwall, 2002b); e-journals (Harter & Ford, 2000;Kim, 2000); journal web sites (Soualmia et al, 2002); and subject-specific web sites (Larson, 1996;Hernández-Borges et al, 1999), perhaps motivated by the analogy with citations (Davenport & Cronin, 2000). Entire countries have also been subjected to web link analysis, however (Ingwersen, 1998).…”

“…Identifying reasons for link creation Academic web sites contain material created for many different purposes (Middleton et al, 1999), and studies of the targets of academic links have found that these pages were of many different types (Cronin et al, 1998), including recreational, with only a tiny minority containing academic content equivalent to a journal article (Thelwall, 2001d). For the similar issue of URL citation in traditional articles, Kim (2000) found that reasons for use extended those for citations to print sources to include medium-specific ones. Zang (2001) found several factors that inhibit URL citing, including self-perceived lack of ability to use the Internet.…”