“Hyperlinks to universities (inlinks) have been found to correlate significantly with research measures in different countries.”

Hyperlinks have attracted a lot of attention from different areas—computer science, social science, and information science. An analogy between hyperlinks and citations has encouraged information scientists to employ bibliometrics methods on the Web. Hyperlinks to universities (inlinks) have been found to correlate significantly with research measures in different countries. This paper, however, found for the first time a significant correlation between inlinks and traditional research measures at the departmental level, at a total of 79 computer science departments at universities within the UK.

Problems involved at this lower-level investigation have been identified and methods to deal with those questions have been devised. This can help to further investigate link structures for departments in different disciplines and from different countries. Furthermore, the significant association between inlinks and research has suggested that inlinks can somehow measure an aspect of a department’s research. Link patterns at the departmental level can also illustrate informal scholarly communication among a set of departments, something that is likely to be taken up by other researchers.

Useful information about research and research communication can be extracted by counting hyperlinks between academic departments.

This research is part of a long-term investigation into patterns of academic Web linking conducted by the Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group at the University of Wolverhampton. Other research has focused on whole universities, rather than on individual departments, or on the development of tools and methodologies. This is part of a new information science research area, namely Webometrics. This research area is exciting for me because of the widespread importance of the Web for the dissemination of information, and the consequent need to develop effective new methods and theories to analyze it.