Which factors explain the Web impact of scientists' personal homepages?

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.

Do highly cited researchers successfully use the social web?

“…Previous studies have shown that scholars often use this to provide information about their research or teaching (Antelman 2004;Barjak 2006;Barjak et al 2007;Björk et al 2010;Dumont and Frindte 2005;Ponte and Simon 2011). In contrast, a research group website is a website in the web domain of an academic institution that focuses on a research group or laboratory.…”

“…For instance, chemists are less prone to adopt the Web than other scientists (Brown 2007). Scholars' web presences have been investigated to some extent, often through personal websites (Barjak et al 2007;Dumont and Frindte 2005;, but also through research group websites (Barjak and Thelwall 2008) and research blogs .…”

Scholarly Impact Revisited

“…Similarly, the number of pages indexed by Google is a general measure of impact that does not include information about the type of impact or reason for the impact (Barjak, Li, & Thelwall, 2007). For example, a researcher may be mentioned on the Web because her work has been received positively or negatively by the media.…”

Indicators for a webometric ranking of open access repositories

“…Due to feasibility reasons all the personal pages were excluded, although even considering the large numbers involved, an analysis of files in formats like pdf, doc or ps could be done for closed lists: departments, institutions, selected topics (Barjak, Li & Thelwall, 2007). The analysis of electronic journals is progressing through more traditional bibliometric and citation analysis, so individual journals and portals were also excluded.…”