Measuring Effectiveness of Institutional Websites: A Case Study of Central Universities of India Akhandanand Shukla Senior Research Fellow Department of Library & Information Science Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi (India)
[email protected] [email protected]
Abstract: Purpose – The study of web impact is one measure for testing the effectiveness of academic institute. Websites are one source of showcasing the knowledge generated by the academic institute. Webometric tools and studies can be used to measure the effectiveness of the institutional websites and rank them accordingly. Design/methodology/approach – Data is collected using software program called ‘Backlink Analyzer’. Data collected for no. of backlinks, total no. of TLDs, Pointing page preferences, and Link Type Relationship. Findings – The study reveals that type or category of academic institutions doesn’t support higher backlinks. During the study it is established that Indian academic websites attract more citations from commercial Web domains than organizational or any other Web domains. Practical implications – The study examines the extent of backlinks given by different domains to Central Universities. The pattern of page pointing & pattern of link type relationship are also examined in the study. Originality/value – This is the first study to examine the present scenario of backlinks structure of Central Universities from India through Backlink Analyser. Keywords: Webometrics; Backlinks ; Top Level Domain; Link Type Relationship
Introduction: The world community now believes in the non-conventional information sources. There are various nonconventional sources available on WWW. The sources available on World Wide Web are now widely used in academic and research activities. It has also been proved that information available on the Web is authentic and useful (Noruzi, 2005a). University websites are multifaceted communication devices, and are increasingly used for a wide variety of purposes, from attracting new students to providing online education. In terms of research, websites can announce the existence and promote the achievements of individuals, research groups, institute(s) and departments. They can also disseminate findings, either by hosting online articles or by publishing summaries, data sets or tools. The pages can be created centrally, by administrators / webmasters, or locally by individuals regarding their research team or projects. Potential benefits of an effective Web
presence include greater research impact, attracting students, media interest and commercial contacts. In this context, it is logical to investigate measures of the effectiveness of websites, both to study the communication activity that they represent and to build useful evaluation metrics (Vaughan & Thelwall, 2005). Motivation of statement (Need of the study): India has a very large higher education system in the world. There are about 370 higher academic & research institutes at national level which includes Universities, Deemed Universities, Indian Institute of Technologies (IITs), Indian Institute of Managements (IIMs), National Institute of Technologies (NITs) & research institutes. More than six thousands colleges are registered under Section 2(f)/12(B) of UGC Act 1956 for imparting education in India. In the age of globalization, it is necessary for every academic institution to check the effectiveness (impact) of their existence and websites play a great role in this. Academic institutions have strong relationship with each other in education, research, training and expertise. Moreover, other commercial organizations, governmental departments, business houses, NGOs etc. also have relationship with the academic institutions. The linking of websites to each other between academic institutions and organizations reveals the relatedness or similarity with each other. So, here a need arises to study the linking pattern of websites of academic and research institutes of India. The present study is an attempt to assess the effectiveness (impact) of websites of academic and research institutions of India on world level and make comparative rankings of different universities based on backlinks study. Scope of the study: For the practical purpose scope of the experiment is limited to universities mentioned as Central Universities at University Grants Commission (UGC) website & University Handbook (31st edition). Central Universities is the category of centrally funded and monitored academic institutions by the Government of India which imparts higher education & conduct research in various field of knowledge. The list of Central Universities is enunciated in table 1. Table 1: List of Central Universities of India SN 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.
Central Universities (Code Name) Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh (AMU) Assam University, Silchar (ASSAM) Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Lucknow (BBAU) Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi (BHU) Central Agricultural University, Iroisemba Imphal (CAUI) Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi (IGNOU) Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi (JMI) Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (JNU) Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Vishwavidyalaya, Wardha (MGAHV) Manipur University, Canchipur Imphal (MUC) Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad (MANUU) Mizoram University, Aizwal (MIZUNI) Nagaland University, Kohima (NAGUNI)
Website Address http://www.amu.ac.in/index.asp http://assamuniversity.nic.in/ http://www.bbauindia.org/ http://www.bhu.ac.in/ http://www.cicmanipur.nic.in/html/cau.asp http://www.ignou.ac.in/divisions/library/index1 .htm http://jmi.nic.in/index.html http://www.jnu.ac.in/ http://www.hindivishwa.org/index.html http://manipuruniv.ac.in/ http://www.manuu.ac.in/ http://www.mzu.edu.in/ http://www.nagauniv.org.in/
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14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.
North Eastern Hill University, Shillong (NEHU) Pondicherry University, Pondicherry (PONDI) Tezpur University, Tezpur (TEZU) University of Allahabad, Allahabad (UOA) University of Delhi, Delhi (UOD) University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad (UOH) Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan (VBU)
http://www.nehu.ac.in/ http://www.pondiuni.org/index.html http://www.tezu.ernet.in/ http://www.alldunivpio.org/ http://www.du.ac.in/ http://www.uohyd.ernet.in/ http://www.visva-bharati.ac.in/
Objectives of the study: The specific aspect of the present study addresses the following objectives: 1. To find out the extent of backlinks of Central Universities. 2. To find out the extent of Top Level Domains of backlinks. 3. To study the Pattern of Pointing of Page from other institutions. 4. To study the Pattern of Link Type Relationship between institutions. Review of Literature and Conceptus: Larson (1996) & Turnbull (1996) investigated the Web as significant scholarly medium for science and scholarship by applying the bibliometric techniques. Almind & Ingwersen (1997) applied a new term “Webometrics” for this area of study. Before this, Rodriguez i Gairin (1997) introduced the concept of information impact on the Internet. Ingwersen (1998) developed the idea of Web Impact Factor by measuring average link frequencies. He pointed out that number of hyperlinks (backlinks) that point to a Web document from other Internet documents might be conceived as an indicator of the impact of this document and its producer(s) on the Internet. Li et al. (2003) found that academic websites are more mature than the other domains in the World Wide Web. Thelwall (2003) pointed that a high Web impact or online impact for a document indicates that it might contain information that may be useful for visitors to the source documents of the links. But this is not always the same. Heimeriks et al. (2003) found that for academic pages, high Web impact may not only reveal something about the documents, but also about their owners: both of the document that includes the link and the linked-to document. Hyperlinks are used to convey reputation and raise credibility; e.g. on scientists’ homepages they might point to previous affiliations raising the scientist’s credibility by establishing a relationship with renowned universities, departments, groups, or individual scholars. Bar-Ilan (2004) conducted the experiment to check the motivation of link creation in Israeli universities. Noruzi (2005a, 2006a) critically evaluated the Web Impact Factor and conducted an experiment for backlinks study of Iranian universities and pointed that backlinks (inlinks) can be seen as an indicator of the overall significance and importance of a website. Vaughan et al. (2006) has examined the context of the links and content of the webpages to determine the motivation for co-link. Noruzi (2006b) stated that backlinks are similar to citations in scientific earticles and backlinks are fair quantitative tools for ranking, evaluating, categorizing, and comparing websites, top level domains, and sub domains. There is a number of backlinks studies have been done for academic institutions and departmental websites. The relationship between backlinks to organizations and their research quality, scientific discipline etc. have been assessed earlier.
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The following are the main concepts which are discussed in the study. I. Backlinks :
The medium which connects two or more hypertext is known as links (or hyperlinks). According to Web Design Glossary of Terms a hyperlink, more commonly called a link, is an electronic connection between one webpage to either (1) other webpages on the same website, or (2) webpages located on another website. More specifically, a hyperlink is a connection between one page of a hypertext document to another. Links are of three types – outgoing links, self links & incoming links. Links going to outside from the website is outgoing (outlinks) links, links coming into a website is known as inlinks (backlinks) and links within the website is known as self links (Noruzi, 2006a). Outlinks are used to pointing external sources and also known as outbound links. Self links are used within the website for navigational purposes of the same website. More the backlinks to a website reveals the impact of the website in that field. For our study, the backlinks study is more important. II. Top Level Domain (TLD):
Wikipedia defines top level domains as “A top level domain (TLD) is the last part of an Internet domain name.” For example, in the domain name of www.yahoo.com, the top level domain is .com. Country code top level domains (ccTLD) & generic top level domains (gTLD) are frequently found in backlinks of academic websites. Some common gTLDs are: .biz, .com, .cat, .edu, .gov, .info, .net, .pro, .org, .tel etc. III. Pattern of Pointing of Page (POP):
Every hyperlink pointing at a website is a potential source of new visitors (Thelwall, 2001). One website is linked with other websites having some common relationship with each other. The websites which have given backlinks to the target websites uses homepages as pointing pages for backlinks. Sometimes internal pages are also used for pointing of pages. If the pointing of pages goes to home pages of a target websites, it represents either the whole website has useful information or the whole website can be seen besides home pages while in case of internal pages, it represents that the particular target page only has specific information. IV. Link Type Relationship (LTR):
Thelwall (2001) has conducted a survey to examine the links between commercial organizations and found that most of the commercial organizations use two way link (reciprocal link) relationship between each other to promote their business products, marketing of products, promotion of products etc. When we talk about linking of hypertext documents (Web pages), a general concept of linking appears in mind that webpages are linked among each other. In another words, website ‘A’ is linked by website ‘B’ or both the websites ‘A’ & ‘B’ have linked with each other. When website ‘A’ is linked by website ‘B’, it is known as one way of linking and when both the websites ‘A’ & ‘B’ have linked each other, it is known as reciprocal way of linking. It is not always possible that every websites have reciprocal links. Most likely, only one way mode of linking found between websites. Reciprocal links are prevalent between business organizations websites. Research Design: The most convenient way of measuring backlinks among academic institutions’ websites is to use the advanced search facilities of general Web search engines. There has much been done on Yahoo! by Ingwersen (1998); Smith & Thelwall (2002); Thelwall (2002); Kousha & Horri (2004); Smith (2004); Nouruzi (2005a, 2006b). The present study uses Yahoo Web services on Backlink Analyzer available at http://tools.seobook.com/Backlink-analyzer/. For the backlinks study, we collected the details of Central Universities of India from University Grants Commission (UGC), New Delhi website and Universities Handbook (31st edition) of Association of
4
Indian Universities, New Delhi. Total 20 Central Universities were found after the amalgamation of data from above said sources. The checking is done for the existence of current web address through Google. The final data is collected in the month of April, 2008 by a software program Backlink Analyzer. It offers number of backlinks, detailed list of top level domains, pointing pages, link type relationship, anchor text etc. The software program had taken the time of minimum 5 minutes to maximum 3 hours for an institution depending on the structure & size of the website. The Backlink Analyzer can collects data form various search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN & AlltheWeb) at a time, if selected. In our study, search engine “Yahoo!” has been selected. Results Analysis and Discussion: A. Extent of Backlinks :
Fig. 1 shows the backlinks of Central Universities in detail. There are total 20 Central Universities in India. The figure reveals unequal distribution of backlinks on Central Universities. Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) has the highest backlinks (800) among all Central Universities whereas Central Agricultural University, Imphal (CAUI) has least number of backlinks (01). There are only 40% Central Universities have equal or more than 100 backlinks and only 25% Central Universities have more than 200 backlinks. This unequal distribution of backlinks to the Central Universities websites reveals that backlinks are not influenced by the type / category of universities. Ranking of Central Universities based on number of backlinks is given in Appendix 2. Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) is on the top and Central Agricultural University, Imphal (CAUI) is on the bottom in the above said ranking of Central Universities of India.
800
729
420
372 80
VBU
26
UOH
UOD
NAGUNI
14
UOA
MIZUNI
112
TEZU
7
181
PONDI
32
NEHU
26
MANUU
106
64
MUC
JNU
JMI
IGNOU
MGAHV
58
33
1
CAUI
29
BHU
36
BBAU
293
ASSAM
900 800 700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0
AMU
No. of backlinks
Backlinks - Central Universities
Universities
Fig. 1: Backlinks of Central Universities of India B. Extent of Top Level Domains (TLDs):
Table 2 represents the detailed breakup of most frequently used top level domains (TLDs) for each of the Central University. The study reveals linking of .com, .org, & .in as top level domains (TLDs) for Central Universities websites. This backlink establishes some relatedness of host website with Central Universities websites. The breakup of different TLDs to Central Universities is presented as follows: Table 2: Breakup of frequently TLDs
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Name of University (in coded form) AMU ASSAM BBAU BHU CAUI IGNOU JMI JNU MGAHV MUC MANUU MIZUNI NAGUNI NEHU PONDI TEZU UOA UOD UOH VBU Total
.com TLDs 192 19 17 133 0 376 19 269 33 15 39 18 4 45 94 53 12 35 164 11 1548
.org TLDs 38 7 7 37 1 147 4 95 9 0 7 3 1 19 21 16 1 15 65 8 501
.in TLDs 42 9 3 47 0 125 7 97 6 6 10 7 1 27 32 25 0 10 66 3 523
Others TLDs 100 1 2 76 0 152 3 268 10 5 8 4 1 15 34 18 1 20 125 4 847
Total TLDs 372 36 29 293 1 800 33 729 58 26 64 32 7 106 181 112 14 80 420 26 3419
Fig. 2 represents percentile of different TLDs against Central Universities. The higher percentile of commercial organization (.com) represents strong linkage between industry and academics. Top Level Domains (TLDs) .org and .in have almost equal distribution of linking to Central Universities websites. There are 25% Top Level Domains (TLDs) comes from others category. Out of 20 Central Universities, 17 Central Universities (85%) have equal or more than 40% .com TLD containing backlinks. Only one Central University (5%) has 100% .org TLD containing backlinks and one Central University (5%) has more than 85% .com TLD containing backlinks.
Top level domain distribution - Central Universities .org
.in
.net
Others
100% 80% 60% 40% 20%
VBU
UOH
UOD
UOA
TEZU
PONDI
NEHU
NAGUNI
MIZUNI
MANUU
MUC
MGAHV
JNU
JMI
IGNOU
CAUI
BHU
BBAU
ASSAM
0%
AMU
TLDs share (%)
.com
Universities
Fig. 2: Share of top level domains (in %)
Fig. 3 presents cumulative sum of different TLDs over all 20 Central Universities.
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TLDs share in total backlinks
others, 847, 25% .com .com, 1548, 45%
.org .in others
.in, 523, 15% .org, 501, 15%
Fig. 3: Top level domains (TLDs) share in total Backlinks This also establishes strong linkage between industry and academics as 45% of all backlinks are from .com domain. About 15% organizational websites (.org TLD) have given backlinks to Central Universities. These organizational websites may include governmental organizations, NGOs & other academic organizations etc. There are 15% Indian organizations (.in TLD) have given backlinks to the Central Universities. This may contain organization like .ac.in but still the impact is not very significant for our result. There are 25% other organizations have given backlinks to the Central Universities. C. Pattern of Pointing of Page (POP):
In order to assess the pattern of pointing of page to the Central Universities websites, it is found that all the backlinked institutes (institutes those have given backlinks to Central Universities) have given more preference to the homepages of the Central Universities websites (Table 3). All Central Universities have more than 50% share (number of counts) of pointing of page as homepage whereas 90% Central Universities have more than 60% share (number of counts) of pointing of page as homepage. Out of 3419 number of counts for pointing of pages 2696 (78.85%) number of counts pointing for homepages of Central Universities websites. Thus homepages of Central Universities have found sound preference for backlinks (Fig. 4). This study also reveals that homepage of the institutes websites is sufficient for showing the relationship with backlinked institute. Table 3: Breakup of pattern of pointing of page Name of Universities (in coded form) AMU ASSAM BBAU BHU CAUI IGNOU
Pointing of Page (Number of counts) Home Page (%)
Blank (%)
Others
222 (60) 30 (83) 24 (83) 239 (82) 1 (100) 663 (83)
146 (39) 6 (17) 5 (17) 50 (17) 0 (0) 118 (15)
4 0 0 4 0 19
Total
372 36 29 293 1 800
7
JMI JNU MGAHV MUC MANUU MIZUNI NAGUNI NEHU PONDI TEZU UOA UOD UOH VBU
31 (94) 591 (81) 46 (79) 20 (77) 49 (77) 26 (81) 5 (71) 85 (80) 145 (80) 84 (75) 12 (86) 45 (56) 356 (85) 22 (85) 2696 (79)
Total
2 (6) 126 (17) 11 (19) 4 (15) 13 (20) 6 (19) 2 (29) 19 (18) 35 (19) 28 (25) 2 (14) 32 (40) 55 (13) 3 (12) 663 (19)
0 12 1 2 2 0 0 2 1 0 0 3 9 1 60
33 729 58 26 64 32 7 106 181 112 14 80 420 26 3419
Pointing of Page - Breakup
VBU
UOH
UOD
UOA
TEZU
PONDI
NEHU
Others
NAGUNI
MIZUNI
Blank
MANUU
MUC
MGAHV
JNU
JMI
IGNOU
CAUI
BHU
BBAU
ASSAM
100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%
AMU
Percentage (%)
Home Page
Central Universities
Fig. 4: Share of Home Page in total no. of pointing of pages D. Pattern of Link Type Relationship (LTR):
LTR study is to assess the pattern of mutual referencing of websites of Central Universities and other domains. Backlink Analyzer shows only one way referencing i.e. from other domains to Central Universities. This represents some kind of affiliation or association or relation of these domains with Central Universities. The results of LTR among websites of Central Universities and other domains are presented in Appendix 1. Conclusion: The challenge of interpreting counts of links to university websites is greatly complicated by their heterogeneity. A single website is likely to contain information created by different types of authors (scholars, administrators, students), for different audiences (internal / external, prospective / current / past students, the public, other scholars) (Middleton et al., 1999) with differing content levels (academic papers, books, teaching notes, student assignments, job adverts, hobby pages, photos or videos of family members) in multiple recognizable and novel genres (lecture notes, link lists, frequently asked questions
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pages) (Cronin et al., 1998; Crowston & Williams, 2000; Haas & Grams, 2000; Harter & Ford, 2000; & Cronin, 2001) and may even contain mis-information (Calvert, 2001). This study examined the extent of backlinks, top level domains, pattern of link type relationship, and pointing of pages from different outsider websites to the websites of Central Universities. Following are the major findings of the study:
The analysis clearly indicates that Central Universities have unequal distribution of backlinks. An Open University website has the highest backlinks among other Central Universities. This indicates that distribution of backlinks is not influenced by the type / category of academic institutions (Fig. 1). Generic top level domains (gTLDs) & Country code top level domains (ccTLDs) containing websites frequently link the Central Universities websites (Table 2). Top Level Domains (TLDs) .com, .org, & .in found frequently in backlinks for Central Universities websites (Table 2). These three (.com, .org, & .in) TLDs containing backlinks cover 75% of total backlinks (Fig. 3), depicting their association. Top Level Domains (TLDs) .com has the highest share (45%) among all the Top Level Domains (TLDs) in total backlinks (Fig. 3). About 85% Central Universities have equal or more than 40% .com TLD containing backlinks (Fig. 2). About 15% .in TLD (ccTLD) containing backlinks indicates that 15% Indian organizations websites have given backlinks to Central Universities websites (Fig. 3), which includes different domains. All Central Universities websites home pages (index pages) found high preference for pointing of backlinks (Fig. 4). There is 100% one way mode of linking of websites found.
In the area of Web society, academic institutions must have Web presence to increase their effectiveness among world level institutions, organizations, governmental departments etc. A qualitative Web presence is the need of the present scenario which increases the effectiveness of academic institutes. The quality of content of Web pages increases the effectiveness of Web presence of institutes. Higher the number of backlinks represents higher quality of Web content of website. The study reveals close bondage of commercial institute with academic institutes though the study is only limited to Central Universities from India. This higher degree of attractiveness depends on qualitative content, simple weblink structure and functional Web structure of institutional website. Though higher backlinks structure is good measure for ranking academic institutes but dynamism of website do affect a lot. However, dynamicity of academic websites represents proper updation and new link creation but removal of old pages of website destroys the existing backlinks structure which makes analysis difficult. References: Almind, T. C., & Ingwersen, P. (1997). Informetric analyses on the World Wide Web: methodological approaches to Webometrics. Journal of Documentation, 53(4), 404-426. Backlink Analyzer. SEOTOOLS. Available at http://tools.seobook.com/Backlink-analyzer/. (Accessed on 12.02.2008). Bar-Ilan, J. (2004). A microscopic link analysis of academic institutions within a country – the case of Israel. Scientometrics, 59(3), 391-403.
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Calvert, P. J. (2001). Scholarly misconduct and misinformation on the World Wide Web. Electronic Library, 19(4), 232-240. Colleges. University Grants Commission (UGC), New Delhi. Available at http://www.ugc.ac.in/inside/ugc_recog_college.html. (Accessed on 15.10.2008). Cronin, B. (2001). Bibliometrics and Beyond: Some thoughts on web-based citation analysis. Journal of Information Science. 27(1), 1-7. Cronin, B., Snyder, H.W., Rosenbaum, H., Martinson, A. & Callahan, E. (1998). Invoked on the web. Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 49(14), 1319-1328. Crowston, K. & Williams, M. (2000). Reproduced and emergent genres of communication in the World Wide Web. Information Society. 16(3), 201-215. Haas, S. W. & Grams, E. S. (2000). Readers, authors and page structure: A discussion of four questions arising from a content analysis of web pages. Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 51(2), 181-192. Harter, S. & Ford, C. (2000). Web-based Analysis of E-journal Impact: Approaches, Problems, and Issues. Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 51(13), 1159-1176. Heimeriks, G., Hoerlesberger, M., & van den Besselaar, P. (2003). Mapping communication and collaboration in heterogeneous research networks. Scientometrics, 58(2), 391-413. Hyperlink. Web Design Glossary of Terms. Available at http://avtecmedia.com/tools/web-designglossary.htm. (Accessed on 15.10.2008). Ingwersen, P. (1998). The calculation of Web Impact Factors. Journal of Documentation, 54(2), 236-243. Kousha, K., & Horri, A. (2004). The relationship between scholarly publishing and the counts of academic Inlinks to Iranian university websites: exploring academic link creation motivations. Journal of Information Management and Scientometrics, 1(2), 13-22. Larson, R. R. (1996). Bibliometrics of the World Wide Web: an exploratory analysis of the intellectual structure of cyberspace. In: Hardin, S. (Ed.) Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting, ASIS 96(71-79). Baltimore. Li, Xuemei; Thelwall, Mike; Musgrove, Peter; & Wilkinson, David (2003). The relationship between the WIFs or Inlinks of Computer Science Departments in UK and their RAE ratings or research productivities in 2001. Scientometrics, 57(2), 239-255. Middleton, I., McConnell, M. & Davidson, G. (1999). Presenting a model for the structure and content of a university World Wide Web site. Journal of Information Science. 25(3), 219-227. Noruzi, A. (2005a). Web Impact Factors for Iranian Universities. Webology, Vol. 2(1), Article 11. Available at: http://www.webology.ir/2005/v2n1/a11.html (Accessed on 14.03.2008). Noruzi, A. (2006a). The Web Impact Factor: a critical review. Electronic Library, 24(4), 490-500. Noruzi, A. (2006b). Web Presence and Impact Factors for Middle-Eastern Countries. Online, 30(2), 2228.
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Rodríguez i Gairín, J. M. (1997). Valorando el impacto de la información en Internet: AltaVista, el "Citation Index" de la red. [Impact assessment of information on the Internet: AltaVista, the Citation Index of the Web]. Revista Española De Documentación Científica, 20(2), 175-181. Available on http://bd.ub.es/pub/rzgairin/altavis.htm (Accessed on 15.10.2008). Smith, A.G. (2004). Citations and links as a measure of effectiveness of online LIS journals. World Library and Information Congress: 70th IFLA General Conference and Council, 22-27 August 2004, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Available on http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla70/papers/049e-Smith.pdf (Accessed on15.10.2008). Smith, A.G. & Thelwall, M. (2002). Web Impact Factors for Australasian Universities. Scientometrics, 54(3), 363-380. Thelwall, M. (2001). Commercial web site links. Internet research: Electronic Networking Applications and Policy, 11(2), 114-124. Thelwall, M. (2002). A comparison of sources of links for academic Web Impact Factor calculations. Journal of Documentation, 58(1), 66-78. Thelwall, M. (2003). What is this link doing here? Beginning a fine-grained process reasons for academic hyperlink creation. Information research, 8(3), no. 151.
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Top Level Domain. Wikipedia. Available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_level_domain. (Accessed on 16.10.2008). Turnbull, D. (1996). Bibliometrics and the World Wide Web, (Technical Report FIS-12-19-1996-1). Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto. Available on http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~donturn/research/bibweb.html (Accessed on 15.10.08). Universities. University Grants Commission (UGC), New Delhi. Available on http://www.ugc.ac.in./inside/university.html (Accessed on 06.03.2007). Universities Handbook (31st edition). Association of Indian Universities. 2006. Vaughan, L., & Thelwall, M. (2005). A modeling approach to uncover hyperlink patterns: the case of Canadian universities. Information Processing & Management, 41, 347-359. Vaughan, L., Gao, Y., & Kipp, M. (2006). Why are hyperlinks to business Websites created? A content analysis. Scientometrics, 67(2), 291–300.
Appendices: Appendix 1: Detailed Data recorded for Central Universities of India SN
Name of University (with Code Name)
No. of Back Links
TLDs (no.)
Preferred Pointing Page (%)
Link Type relations hip
11
1.
Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh (AMU)
372
2.
Assam University, Silchar (ASSAM)
36
3.
Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Lucknow (BBAU)
29
4.
Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi (BHU)
293
5.
Central Agricultural University, Iroisemba Imphal (CAUI) Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi (IGNOU)
01
6.
800
7.
Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi (JMI)
33
8.
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (JNU)
729
9.
Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Vishwavidyalaya, Wardha (MGAHV)
58
10.
Manipur University, Canchipur Imphal (MUC)
26
11.
Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad (MANUU)
64
12.
Mizoram University, Aizwal (MIZUNI)
32
13.
Nagaland University, Kohima (NAGUNI)
07
14.
North Eastern Hill University, Shillong (NEHU)
106
15.
Pondicherry University, Pondicherry (PONDI)
181
16.
Tezpur University, Tezpur (TEZU)
112
17.
University of Allahabad, Allahabad (UOA)
14
18.
University of Delhi, Delhi (UOD)
80
19.
University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad (UOH)
420
20.
Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan (VBU)
26
.com(192) .org (38) .in (42) .com (19) .org (07) .in (09) .com (17) .org (07) .in (03) .com(133) .org (37) .in (47) .org (01) .com(376) .org (147) .in (125) .com (19) .org (04) .in (07) .com(269) .org (95) .in (97) .com (33) .org (09) .in (06) .com (15) .in (06) .com (39) .org (07) .in (10) .com (18) .org (03) .in (07) .com (04) .org (01) .in (01) .com (45) .org (19) .in (27) .com (94) .org (21) .in (32) .com (53) .org (16) .in (25) .com (12) .org (01) .net (01) .com (35) .org (15) .in (10) .com(164) .org (65) .in (66) .com (11) .org (08) .in (03)
Home Page (60)
One way
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Appendix 2: Ranking of Central Universities of India (Ranking based on No. of Backlinks) Rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19
Name of University (with Code Name) Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi (IGNOU) Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (JNU) University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad (UOH) Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh (AMU) Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi (BHU) Pondicherry University, Pondicherry (PONDI) Tezpur University, Tezpur (TEZU) North Eastern Hill University, Shillong (NEHU) University of Delhi, Delhi (UOD) Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad (MANUU) Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Vishwavidyalaya, Wardha (MGAHV) Assam University, Silchar (ASSAM) Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi (JMI) Mizoram University, Aizwal (MIZUNI) Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Lucknow (BBAU) Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan (VBU) & Manipur University, Canchipur Imphal (MUC) University of Allahabad, Allahabad (UOA) Nagaland University, Kohima (NAGUNI) Central Agricultural University, Iroisemba Imphal (CAUI)
No. of Back Links 800 729 420 372 293 181 112 106 80 64 58 36 33 32 29 26
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