Informetric theories and methods for exploring the Internet: an analytical survey of recent research literature

Library Trends, Wntr, 2002 by Judit Bar-Ilan, Bluma C. Peritz

INFORMETRIC ANALYSIS

Irrespective of the data collection method, the collected data have to undergo some analysis in order to arrive at meaningful conclusions. Sometimes simple processing and standard statistical and mathematical analysis are sufficient, but at other times specific informetric methods, models, or laws are utilized. In the following sections we review the use of these methods, models, and laws for analyzing data from and about the Internet.

Citation Analysis

Harter (1996 and 1998) carried out one of the earliest attempts to assess the scholarly impact of electronic journals. He measured the number of citations of thirty-nine e-journals received by February 1996. The citations were extracted from ISI's Citation Indexes. Fifteen journals were not cited at all, and only seven were cited eleven times or more. Except for one or two exceptions the impact of these journals (in early 1996) was minimal.

Zhang (1998) investigated the citations to e-sources in library and information science journals during the period 1994 and 1996. E-sources were defined as: E-mail messages, messages posted to newsgroups and discussion lists, publications of any kind (not necessarily refereed), commercial sources, and other e-sources available from the Internet. Harter counted citations the specific e-journals received from journals indexed by ISI. Zhang, on the other hand, examined all types of references to e-sources appearing in the ten most highly cited library and information science journals and in four library and information science oriented e-journals. Except for the e-references appearing in the four e-journals, the impact of the e-sources was negligible.

At the very beginning, researchers noticed that incoming links to a Web page measure its visibility (see, e.g., Bray, 1996 or Woodruff et al., 1996). Links can be seen as analogues of citations in the academic world. General search engines, like Alta Vista and Hotbot (http://www.hotbot.lycos.com), retrieve lists of URLs in their database linking to a given URL or site. Recently Google (www.google.com) also added this option. Because of the limited coverage of the Web by these search tools, the link information is also limited. For example, consider the homepage of Library Trends (http://www.lis.uiuc.edu/puboff/catalog/trends/). Alta Vista found 14 pages linking to it, Hotbot found 6 links, while Google found 129 pages linking to this URL. A similar search for the homepage of JASIS (http://www.asis.org/Publications/JASIS/jasis/html) resulted in 226 links reported by Alta Vista, 160 links reported by Hotbot, and 245 links reported by Google. Even this small example illustrates that we cannot rely on search engines to produce reliable visibility data. All searches were carried out on November 18, 2000. The accuracy of the results was not examined.

Chakrabarti, Gibson, & McCurley (1999) advocate the provision of backlinks (pages that link to a given page) by the sites themselves and not through the search engines. Even though the implementation is not difficult, they are aware of privacy concerns and of other barriers of acceptance. For instance, commercial sites most likely will not be interested in linking to bad reviews about their products or to pages that also mention their competitors. In fact, it is hard to imagine that any site would be willing to include in the lists of pages that link to it those pages that have a negative attitude towards the site.