IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jamist/v62y2011i8p1488-1497.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A comparison of methods for collecting web citation data for academic organizations

Author

Listed:
  • Mike Thelwall
  • Pardeep Sud

Abstract

The primary webometric method for estimating the online impact of an organization is to count links to its website. Link counts have been available from commercial search engines for over a decade but this was set to end by early 2012 and so a replacement is needed. This article compares link counts to two alternative methods: URL citations and organization title mentions. New variations of these methods are also introduced. The three methods are compared against each other using Yahoo!. Two of the three methods (URL citations and organization title mentions) are also compared against each other using Bing. Evidence from a case study of 131 UK universities and 49 US Library and Information Science (LIS) departments suggests that Bing's Hit Count Estimates (HCEs) for popular title searches are not useful for webometric research but that Yahoo!'s HCEs for all three types of search and Bing's URL citation HCEs seem to be consistent. For exact URL counts the results of all three methods in Yahoo! and both methods in Bing are also consistent. Four types of accuracy factors are also introduced and defined: search engine coverage, search engine retrieval variation, search engine retrieval anomalies, and query polysemy.

Suggested Citation

  • Mike Thelwall & Pardeep Sud, 2011. "A comparison of methods for collecting web citation data for academic organizations," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 62(8), pages 1488-1497, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jamist:v:62:y:2011:i:8:p:1488-1497
    DOI: 10.1002/asi.21571
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21571
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1002/asi.21571?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Enrique Orduña-Malea, 2021. "Dot-science top level domain: Academic websites or dumpsites?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(4), pages 3565-3591, April.
    2. Carlos Olmeda-Gómez & Maria-Antonia Ovalle-Perandones & Antonio Perianes-Rodríguez, 2017. "Co-word analysis and thematic landscapes in Spanish information science literature, 1985–2014," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 113(1), pages 195-217, October.
    3. Wenqiang Fan, 2015. "Contribution of the institutional repositories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to the webometric indicators of their home institutions," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 105(3), pages 1889-1909, December.
    4. David Gunnarsson Lorentzen, 2014. "Webometrics benefitting from web mining? An investigation of methods and applications of two research fields," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 99(2), pages 409-445, May.
    5. Benedetto Lepori & Isidro F. Aguillo & Marco Seeber, 2014. "Size of web domains and interlinking behavior of higher education institutions in Europe," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 100(2), pages 497-518, August.
    6. Lepori, Benedetto & Barberio, Vitaliano & Seeber, Marco & Aguillo, Isidro, 2013. "Core–periphery structures in national higher education systems. A cross-country analysis using interlinking data," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 7(3), pages 622-634.
    7. Srijana Acharya & Han Woo Park, 2017. "Open data in Nepal: a webometric network analysis," Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, Springer, vol. 51(3), pages 1027-1043, May.
    8. Amalia Mas-Bleda & Mike Thelwall & Kayvan Kousha & Isidro F. Aguillo, 2014. "Do highly cited researchers successfully use the social web?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 101(1), pages 337-356, October.
    9. Junwei Ma & Jianhua Wang & Philip Szmedra, 2019. "Sustainable Competitive Position of Mobile Communication Companies: Comprehensive Perspectives of Insiders and Outsiders," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(7), pages 1-15, April.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jamist:v:62:y:2011:i:8:p:1488-1497. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.asis.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.