Relationship between the Scholarly Publishing and ...

Download PDF
1 downloads 1097 Views 323KB Size Report
Comment
universities' web spaces have been center of attention in the most current link ..... Iranian university with domain name ending in .edu, Azarbaijan University of ...
The Relationship between Scholarly Publishing and the Counts of Academic Inlinks to Iranian University Web Sites: Exploring Academic Link Creation Motivations Kayvan Kousha PhD Student, Department of Library and information Science University of Tehran, Iran

Abbas Horri Senior Lecturer, Department of Library and Information Science University of Tehran, Iran

Abstract: Results of an initial study show that inlinks from the .edu domain to 34 Iranian university web sites correlate strongly with a measure of their national research productivity. The need to interpret authors’ motivations for creating academic links to Iranian university web sites is addressed by a survey of valid 440 links from the .edu domain. For the initial classification, a scheme in a previous related study is applied and motivations are interpreted based upon one person’s judgment. Results showed that no links were created for formal scholarly reasons, equivalent to journal citations. Only 27% of links were created for informal scholarly communication reasons. The majority of the inlinks, 63%, were created for gratuitous or navigational reasons and about 10% were related to non-academic motivations. It is concluded that motivations for link creation to the Iranian national academic system are probably influenced mainly by sociological issues. Keywords: University Web Sites; Link Creation Motivations; Scholarly Communication; Iran

1 Introduction Many articles have been written on Web links and their interesting nature for exploring a kind of scholarly communication with reasons to consider whether theories of bibliometrics, such as journal citations, can be applied to the Web environment (for example, Almind & Ingwersen, 1997; Rousseau, 1997; Ingwersen, 1998; Wormell, 1998; Borgman & Furner, 2002). Thelwall, Vaughan & Björneborn’s (in press) Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) chapter on “Webometrics” provides in-depth view on different aspects and methods of scholarly communication research on the Web. The following review shows that national universities’ web spaces have been center of attention in the most current link analysis research. Results of several quantitative research studies indicate that there is a relationship between links to university web sites and their national rankings or other research productivities in different national academic web spaces (Thelwall, 2001a; Smith & Thelwall, 2002; Thelwall & Tang, 2003; Vaughan & Thelwall, in press). Other studies show that there is an even more significant correlation between research-oriented inlinks and research productivities in an academic web spaces (Thelwall, 2001a; Thelwall & Harries, 2003). However, no implicit causative connections have been claimed for the relationship between web links and research in the above studies.  Corresponding author. Tel.: ++98-21-2540235; Fax: ++98-218006863. E-mail addresses: [email protected] The authors would like to thank Mike Thelwall, Liwen Vaughan, Ali Shiri and the referees for their very helpful comments.

1

The key questions raised in some of the related studies are as follows. What is the cause of the correlation between the inlinks and research within an academic web space? Are ininks or even academic inlinks to universities web sites representatives of formal scholarly communications or are there possibilities for randomly link creation or for informal scholarly activities? Consequently, it seems necessary to explore reasons for the significant correlations found between links and research. One approach to answer such questions is to use qualitative methods to interpret the results of the pervious quantitative research. Thelwall & Harries (2003) consider three interconnected issues related to the validity and interpretation of the quantitative results of link analysis studies in academic web spaces: categorization (What kind of pages are linked to?); motivation (Why do scholars link to these pages at other universities?); and host university research relationships (what is the cause of the relationship between the research conducted at a university and the propensity of others to link to its pages?) Exploring link creation motivations, discussed in some related research, would be next important step to provide some validity to previous quantitative link analysis studies on the web (Thelwall, 2003; Wilkinson et al, 2003). The exact recognition of link motivations by authors of web sites is a subjective issue. Therefore, in some cases, there are a number of limitations in extracting and to identifying real author motivations for creating links, even through the application of qualitative methods. Similar subjective problems can be viewed in other research areas of information science such as traditional citation analysis (for example classifying the motivations for citations to journal articles) and the concept of relevance in information retrieval (retrieving relevant documents based on users’ information needs). Thus, it is not surprising that the results of the key study illustrates the difficulty in classifying link creation motivations within the UK academic web space (Wilkinson et al, 2003).

2 Related research During the last six years, there appears to be increasing interest in webometrics studies. Scholarly communication on the Web can be considered to be the main reason in encouraging more webometrics research. Reviewing the ARIST chapter on “Webometrics” (in press) shows that “national university systems have been the focus for most information science link analyses”. It seems that despite the much quantitative research on the academic web spaces demonstrating that counts of inlinks to university web sites significantly correlate with research productivity; there are a relatively small number of studies trying to directly determine motivations for link creation within and between university web sites. Many of the link analysis studies has been motivated by citation analysis. Two main studies found a significant correlation between inlinks to journal Web site and their ISI impact factors related to the Library and Information Science (Vaughan & Hysen, 2002) and Law disciplines (Vaughan & Thelwall, 2003). But no causative connections have been claimed for the relation between web links and journal impact factors. Two main qualitative studies explored motivations for creating links to electronic journal articles (Kim 2000; Herring, 2002). As mentioned before, there are a small number of qualitative studies exploring link creation motivations within or between academic web spaces. Using qualitative methodologies, Thelwall (2003) and Wilkinson et al. (2003) discovered link creation motivations, both in the UK national university system. They use different methodologies for judgment and classification of link creation motivations. Wilkinson et al. (2003) took a random collection of 414 links from ac.uk domain and classified them based upon the researchers’ assessments. The inter-classifier agreement was found to be problematic, because of multiple potential motivations. The results showed that the majority of links (over 90%) were created for broadly scholarly reasons by researchers or students and only two were equivalent to journal citations. It was concluded that academic web link metrics will be 2

dominated by a range of informal types of scholarly communication. Of the 414 links the researchers disagreed on the categorization for 120 (29%) since there was a clear overlap between certain categories, for example between student-related and research-related web links. It concluded that web links between UK universities (excluding e-journals) are very different from citations, but they can be seen as natural by-products of scholarly activities. Wilkinson’s classification scheme consists of 10 categories related to reasons for link creation including, student learning material, information for students, research support and resources, research partners, recreational, page creators or sponsors, research references, tourist information, libraries and e-journals, and similar departments. Thelwall (2003) took a sample of 100 random inter-site links to UK university home pages for a qualitative exploration. The investigation methodology was an inductive content analysis based on one person's interpretation of the link motivation, without cross-checking by additional classifiers. Initial classification scheme was drawn up based upon observations from previous web page analysis experiments that used similar approach. Four new types of common link motivations, which were unique to the web were postulated including, general navigational links; ownership links; social links; and gratuitous links. Thelwall et al. (2003) in a pilot study investigated the subjects that had the most impact on the Web, and looked for national differences in online subject visibility. The subject classification to academic Web sites was found problematic issue and the need of additional study for improvement of inter-classifier consistency to ensure the validity and reliability of the data and to cope with the relatively fast changing nature of academic subjects was proposed. Although, results of the most of the link analysis studies in the national academic web space indicates that there is a significant correlation between counts of links to a university and their national measures of research productivity, it does not imply that there is a cause-and-effect relation. The present study investigates the possible correlation between Iran’s national research productivity measure and the counts of inlinks from different sources of domains. In order to validate the quantitative data on inlinks counts and to find reasonable explanations for the strongest correlation between links and research, a qualitative methodology for manual checking of links is applied.

3 The research questions The question to be addressed is which inlinks from several sources of domains (including .com, .org, .net, .edu, .ir, .ac.ir and .int) have the most significant/no significant correlation with a measure of scholarly publishing in Iran (using the number of the ISI articles as one of the main national approved measure of research productivity).We can summarize the following research questions:

   

Which inlinks from top-level domains (com, org, net, edu, ir, int and ac.ir) have the strongest/no significant correlation with a measure of scholarly publishing in Iran If academic inlinks have the strongest correlation with scholarly publishing, which proportion of link creation motivations are related to journals or proceedings citation, as one of the most conventional type of formal scholarly communications? What significant proportions of academic inlinks are related to informal scholarly activities? What are the most common link motivations to the Iranian university web space?

3

4 Methodology 4.1 Data collection tool AltaVista was chosen for its relatively good coverage and its advanced search facilities for link counting of the Web sites. Some pervious studies found that AltaVista is more reliable (Thelwall, 2001b; Vaughan & Thelwall, 2003) and give relatively good coverage of academic web space (Thelwall, 2001a). It should be emphasized that inlinks counts will include only pages that were indexed by AltaVista, not password protected, HTML frames and other pages that are not known by AltaVista crawler and not linked to by any other indexed pages in the database. We may see other limitations such as national biases in site coverage in most methodologies using commercial search engines for crawler based Web surveys described by Vaughan and Thelwall (2004, in press). During current study it was found that in many cases it is not possible to access all displayed results in the second or subsequent pages of results. In fact, it was recognized that there are significant differences between inlinks counts in the first and the subsequent pages of results in AltaVista. For example, while first result in AltaVista displayed 268 inlinks counting form .edu domain for Sharif University of Technology, actually only 128 web sites targeting Sharif University were accessible in the subsequent pages of results. This was happened in several other cases such as the University of Tehran with 144 inlinks counting in the first page and 70 accessible sites in the subsequent pages of results. Therefore, discovering which results, first or subsequent pages, had the validity for the quantitative study (correlation between inlinks and scholarly publishing), was a crucial issue. Although, it may give the impression that counting accessible inlinks in the subsequent pages of results is more reliable (because one can check the second set of results) and the first results are more of a guess, a comparison of results from different host search methods indicates that the second results are more unreliable. For this reason, an advanced search was conducted as shown below for the University of Tehran: link:ut.ac.ir AND NOT host:ut.ac.ir AND host:ac All retrieved web sites through above query were manually checked form 10 university web spaces. The results showed that while there were unique hits (academic inlinks in this study) in the results of queries which were limited by host:ac.ir (for Iranian academic interlinking) or host:ac AND NOT host:ac.ir (for non-Iranian academic inlinks with .ac in their domain names), in several cases we can not discover the same hits in the results limited by host:ac, with the more possible coverage of different academic web spaces. Moreover, it was realized that the sum of inlinks counting, in the first page of results in AltaVista, from both Iranian universities (limited by host:ac.ir) and non-Iranian universities web spaces (limited by host:ac AND NOT host:ac.ir) was equal to results of the above query (which theoretically should include both of them). In other words, it seems that the problem of inconsistency relates to AltaVista’s displaying all the results in the subsequent pages, not the number of total hits in the first pages of the results. Thus, in the current study all the inlinks counting were extracted from the first pages of the results in AltaVista for the quantitative study (correlations analysis) and compulsorily only those accessible web sites in the subsequent pages of results were loaded into web browser for link creation motivations study. This method of inlinks counting was considered as a reasonable “argument for using the first results instead of the second in this study” by other webometrics researcher (Thelwall, 2004).

4.2 Data collection methods The national report of Iran’s Ministry of Science, Research and Technology (MSRT) was used as the basic data set for scholarly publishing in all Iranian universities (Iran’s national report, 2002). This report ranks Iranian universities based on their published articles in journals which were indexed by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) every year. It is one of the most important national measures of research productivity among Iranian universities and academic institutions. 4

The latest report ranks Iranian universities by their published articles in ISI’s journals in 2002 and was used as the only national measure of research productivity among Iranian universities. Then, complete list of Iranian universities web sites and their possible another commonly used domain name obtained from several official sites (like Ministry of Science, Research and Technology), Iran’s web directories and related links in other Iranian universities web sites. In several cases, names of the universities searched in the major search engines. Ultimately, out of 44 universities ranked in MSRT’s report, only 34 universities had the English version of the web site accessible during the period of data collection (05-08, January, 2004). Advanced queries were used on each Iranian university web sites for calculation of inlinks count from different sources of domains. This is very similar to the pervious research methodology for comparison of sources of links for academic Web Impact Factor calculations in UK academic web space (Thelwall, 2002). Five Iranian universities had two commonly used domain names. Therefore, an advanced query was used for calculating inlinks, as shown below for the Sharif University of Technology with two commonly used domain names: (link:sharif.ac.ir OR link:sharif.edu) AND NOT (host:sharif.ac.ir OR host:sharif.edu) This will return inlinks (external links) count that are indexed by AltaVista and have domain names in either .sharif.ac.uk or .sharif.edu. For counting inlinks from .com, .org, .net, .edu, .ir, .ac.ir and .int domains the following advanced queries were used, as for Sharif University of Technology: (link:sharif.ac.ir OR link:sharif.edu) AND domain:com In the case of two universities, Sharif University of Technology and Azarbaijan University of Tarbiat Moallem, with another commonly used domain name ending in .edu, the following complex advanced query was used for calculating inlinks from .edu domain: (link:sharif.ac.ir OR link:sharif.edu) AND NOT host:sharif.edu AND NOT host:azaruniv.edu AND domain:edu This will return inlinks count from the .edu domain (mostly American universities), excluding self-links from Sharif University of Technology itself as well as inlinks from another Iranian university with domain name ending in .edu, Azarbaijan University of Tarbiat Moallem. In order to calculate national interlinking among Iranian universities all with domain name endings in .ac.ir, the following query was used as shown for Sharif University of Technology: (link:sharif.ac.ir OR link:sharif.edu) AND NOT host:sharif.ac.ir AND host:ac.ir Another complex search strategy was conducted to calculate inlinks count from an area containing university web sites with the .ac host name, for example from UK, Australia, Japan, India, China and other national web spaces with .ac host name (such as, ac.uk, ac.au, ac.jp, ac.in and ac.cn). It is obvious that there are many national academic web spaces which do not use “.ac” in their domain name, such as Canada, Denmark, and France and so on. Therefore, they are not included in the following query and care must be taken in interpreting the results for all national academic web spaces. (link:sharif.ac.ir OR link:sharif.edu) AND NOT host:sharif.ac.ir AND NOT host:ac.ir AND host:ac

5

Manual checking of the results showed that the following method of limiting search to host:ac is relatively precise. Because, out of 1698 inlinks from above query, only 41 sites were not related to academic web spaces. It can be claimed that, at least in the case of Iranian academic web space, using “host:ac” in AltaVista for calculating inlinks from various national university systems with the .ac in their domain name is relatively appropriate search strategy. Finally, the following query was used for calculating inlinks from .ir domain and excluding the Iranian academic web space with domain name ending in .ac.ir, as shown for Sharif University of Technology: (link:sharif.ac.ir OR link:sharif.edu) AND NOT host:ac.ir AND domain:ir

4.3 The classification scheme and judgment on link creation motivations The inductive content analysis methodology by one person was chosen for an initial analysis of academic link creation motivation to the Iranian university web sites. Thus, no interviews or crosschecking by additional classifiers were performed. This can be considered as the main limitation of the current study. The methodology used here is based on one person’s perception and interpretation of link creation motivations in the academic web – and so can not be generalized to other areas of research. The aim of using this methodology is to provide an overall view on link creation motivations to Iranian universities and simply to use an initial qualitative manual checking to validate the quantitative data on inlinks counts. Since, classification of link motivations is a highly subjective issue, the purpose of the classification was merely to discover and identify types of apparent and clear-cut linking motivation that were sufficiently frequent to support discussion. Despite the current limitation, the results of this study can be compared with other studies. In fact, follow-up investigations will be required to give a more in-depth image of link creation motivations to the Iranian academic web space through author interviews or researchers/classifiers judgments. The current study intends to use classification schemes proposed in Wilkinson et al study and to investigate how it can be applied in Iran academic web spaces. Moreover, the study seeks for other possible classes based on frequency of link creation motivations to the Iranian universities. In other words, it is interesting to examine if additional classification scheme can be proposed for the Iranian academic web space. Some kind of link creation motivation might be simply very straightforward such as journal citations or links from homepages of Iranian students or lecturers in American universities to their former degree awarding universities in Iran. One key question in Wilkinson et al study was related to the “proportion of pages created for reasons equivalent to journal citations”. It can be assumed that there is less/no disagreement on identification and classification of these types of apparent linking motivations, even through one researcher’s perception. Formal scholarly communication, equivalent to journal citations, has particular importance for the interpretation of academic inlinks in most quantitative studies and might be more easily identified by human manual checking. Although, one person’s perception and interpretation of link creation motivations is the main limitation of the current study, other methodologies may have their own limitations too. For example sending emails or telephone interviews with web page authors to ask them some questions to remember their motivation for creating links possibly several years ago and getting enough response rates are possibly difficult tasks and time consuming, discussed in other studies (Thelwall, 2003). Moreover, the result of a related study using cross-checking methodology for discovering link creation motivation within UK universities showed that the researchers (or classifiers) disagreed on the categorization for 29% of links (Wilkinson et al, 2003).



Only the first author of this article was involved in interpretation of link creation motivations.

6

5. Results and discussion 5.1 Correlation between inlinks and scholarly publishing Result of the current study shows that while various source domains (.edu, .org, .ac.ir, .ac, .com, .ir and .net) correlate with scholarly publishing in 34 Iranian universities, the inlinks from the .edu domain has the strongest correlation (0.841**). In other words, universities with higher scholarly publications (number of ISI articles as national research productivity measure in Iran), receive higher academic inlinks from the American universities or academic institutions with domain name ending in .edu. No inlink from .int domain to 34 Iranian universities was found. Spearman correlation coefficients were calculated between counts of inlinks from top-level domains and universities’ scholarly publishing (Table 1). Spearman coefficients were used instead of Pearson because the distribution of web links was found to be significantly skewed. Table 1. Spearman correlation coefficients between number of ISI articles and inlinks count from top-level domains for 34 Iranian universities

Type of domain .edu .org .ac.ir .ac .com .ir .net

Total inlinks count 672 1411 1455 202 4778 822 884

Correlation

0.841 0.779 0.778 0.761 0.754 0.715 0.709

All significant are at the 0.1% level. The highest correlation is in bold.

Figures 1 shows the strongest relationship between inlinks count from the .edu domain with scholarly publishing for 34 Iranian universities. The graph demonstrates how two highly ranked universities, Sharif University of Technology and University of Tehran, with 219 and 214 ISI articles, have received 268 and 144 inlinks from the .edu domain respectively. 300

200

100

0

-100 -100

0

100

200

300

.edu Inlinks

Figure 1. A graph to illustrate the relationship between inlinks from the .edu domain, with scholarly publishing for 34 Iranian universities. 

As described in the section 4.2 in this article, this method was used for calculating inlinks from non-Iranian academic spaces with domain name ending in .ac (for example, .ac.uk, .ac.ch. .ac.jp and so on) and excluding in links from Iranian universities with domain name ending in .ac.ir.  As described in the section 4.2 in this article, this method was used for calculating inlinks from domain name ending in .ir and excluding inlinks from Iranian universities with domain name ending in .ac.ir.

7

5.2 Classifying reasons for links to Iran’s academic web space In order to validate the quantitative data of the .edu inlinks counts and to find reasonable explanations for the strongest correlation between the .edu inlinks and scholarly publishing, a qualitative methodology for manual checking of inlinks was applied. Out of 672 .edu inlinks counted from the AltaVista’s in the first page of results, only 458 inlinks were accessible in the second or subsequent pages of the results. This problem was described before in the section 4.1 of this article. Moreover, of the 458 .edu inlinks, 18 inlinks were not accessible during this study. Consequently, 440 valid links were chosen for manual checking of link creation motivations. Thus, no random sample of links was compiled. Of the 34 Iranian universities with available English version of the web site, 25 universities were targeted by inlinks from the .edu domains, mainly by American universities. The authors encountered with several problems during classification process of links creation motivations, very similar to those mentioned in Wilkinson et al. study (2003). While in some cases classifying reasons for links seems very straightforward such as inlinks from Iranian students or lecturers’ homepages in American universities to their former university homepages in Iran, there were many inlinks with potential multiple link creation motivations which could be categorized in two or more classes. Initial classification of 440 links showed that 159 links (36.2%) were created from Iranian (or American born Iranian) students or lecturers’ homepages in the American universities to their previous university homepages in Iran, where they have generally obtained their undergraduate or postgraduate degrees. Most of such links are embedded in the “Education” section of students/lecturers’ CV. Table 2 gives more details on this kind of link creation motivations. Further research is considered necessary to find some explanations for why this type of link creations is the most common motivation for targeting the Iranian academic web space. In the case of Iran, it is proposed to classify this type of specific links motivation in a separate category. It is important that nearly 150 of such inlinks targeting Iranian universities were from different sources (students/lecturers’ homepages). Thelwall used the term "gratuitous links" for such link creation, “the links that are not expected to be used, nor do they play any other identifiable communication role” (Thelwall, 2003).

Table 2. Classification of .edu inlinks from students/lectures’ homepages to their degree awarding universities

Type of links Links from PhD students’ homepages Links from Lecturers’ homepages Links from M.S. students’ homepages Total

.edu inlinks count 80 68 11 159

% 18.2 15.5 2.5 36.2

It was investigated that 92 .edu inlinks (21%) targeting Iranian University homepages are related to seven Iranian student associations in the American universities (Table.3). The motivations of such links can be considered as either information for students (because audiences of sites are mainly students) or as general navigational links. It is suggested to classify this type of link motivation (because of its relatively significant proportion, 21%) in an individual category, since sources and targets had similar characteristics.

8

Table 3. edu inlinks count/percent form Iranian student associations web sites in the American universities to homepages of Iranian university web sites

Name of student association Tufts University Stanford University University of Michigan University of California, San Diego North Carolina State University Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis University of Southern California Total

.edu inlinks count 23 17 13 12 10 10

% 5.2 3.9 3.0 2.7 2.3 2.3 1.6 21%

7 92

27 links (6.1%) targeting Iranian university homepages were from web directory or subject indexes. This kind of links can be considered as general navigational links from web directories or subject indexes (Table 4). In the current study this type of links classified as web directory/subject indexes links. While the purpose of such links seems similar of those from Iranian student associations (Table 3) as for navigation, the authors make difference between the sources in the classification process. Table4. edu inlinks count/percent from web directories/ library web sites to Iranian universities

Sources of general navigational inlinks to Iranian universities University of Texas International Network Information Systems UCLA Library –Middle East links World Wide Colleges and Universities Other navigational links Total

.edu Inlinks count

%

8 1.8 1.6 1.1 1.6 6.1

7 5 7 27

Table 5 summarizes other motivations for link creations (36.7%), basically derived from Wilkinson et al (2003) classification scheme. Other motivations for .edu inlinks Table 5. other sources of .edu inlinks to Iranian universities, based upon Wilkinson et al classification scheme

Information for students Resource support and resources Research partners Recreational Tourist information Library and journal Similar departments No idea Total

.edu inlinks count 63 5 16 5 7 6 30 30 162

% 14.3 1.1 3.6 1.1 1.6 1.4 6.8 6.8 36.7

63 links (14.3%) were recognized as information for students. For example, from homepage of RoboCup Teams 2002 (which is based at Cornell University) to the homepage of the Iranian team at Isfehan University of Technology. 5 links (1.1%) were related to research support and resources (for example from Williams College of Astronomy to Web site containing information on total eclipse in Iran based at University of Isfehan).  it was realized that Iranian university homepages have received 36 .edu inlinks from web sites of two computer related programs (ACM Asia Programming Contest and RoboCup Samllsize teams), in which Iranian universities had some contributions. This type of links was classified as “information for students, as shown in Table 5.

9

16 links (3.6%) were recognized as research partners (for example, from Kevorkian Center for Modern Middle East Studies at New York University to The International Center for Persian Language Studies at University of Tehran). Motivations of 7 links (1.6%) were apparently identified as tourist information (for example, linking to pages containing tourist information on Shiraz, one of the most popular sightseeing in Iran accessible through web site of University of Shiraz) and 5 links (1.1%) were associated with recreational (for example, links from a student homepage to homepage of his/her friends based at Iranian University web sites). Of 6 links (1.4%) related to library and journal category, one link from list of fuzzy systems e-journals at North Carolina State University has targeted homepage of an electronic journal (Iranian Journal of Fuzzy Systems) and 5 links from Libweb (which is based at University of California, Berkeley) have targeted the homepages of Iranian university libraries. 30 links (6.8%) were from departments in the American universities to their Iranian counterparts (for example, from Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Missouri-Rolla to same department in Sharif University of Technology). The authors had no idea on the motivations of 30 links creation (6.8%) generally retrieved from list-serves and mailing lists in the American university web sites. For example in 17 cases, assessment of target pages showed that they have been retrieved because of email addresses with domain name ending .ac.ir (for example [email protected]). In other words, using command link: in AltaVista may retrieve sources with email addresses related to those links. No link equivalent to journal or proceedings citations, direct student learning material and page creator or sponsor as the result of the classification exercise in Wilkinson et al. study (2003) was identified. Figure 2 gives the classification scheme used for 440 valid links. The majority of the .edu links, nearly 160 (36%) were created from students/lectures’ homepage targeting homepages of the Iranian universities. Figure 2. Final classification scheme for the .edu Web links to the Iranian academic web space 40.0

36.2

35.0 30.0 25.0 21.0 20.0 14.3

15.0 10.0

6.8

6.1

6.8

3.6

5.0

1.1

1.6

1.1

1.4

ep rd ila

id ea o 11 .N

jo an d ry br a Li

9.

To ur is

ar tm en ts

ur na l

n at io or m ti

nf

ec re 7.

R 8.

10 .S im

rc e es ou R 5.

10

at io na l

rt ne rs ar ch

pa

s R

or t su pp

es e

re so ur ce

an d

fo r n at io

fo rm In 4.

6.

st u

de nt s

ct or ie s

fr om lin ks

na l vi ga tio

na G

en er al

re di

om 'h

oc i ss en ta

st ud 3.

Li 2.

1.

Li

nk s

nk s

fr

fr om

om

st ud

en ts

/le ct u

re r

at io ns

s'

ho m

ep a

ge

ep ag es

s

0.0

6 Conclusion In order to present more general view on 440 link creation motivations mainly from the American university to the Iranian university web space, all motivations were merged into three broader categories, as shown in Table 6. For example, amalgamating old categories 4-6, 9, 10 in the Figure 2 formed a new broader class as the student/staff support shown in the Table 6. Table 6 .result of merging old categories into 3 broader classes

Other sources of .edu inlinks A. Gratuitous/navigational links B. Student/staff support C. Non-Academic Total

Old categories in Fig. 2 1-3 4-6, 9, 10 7, 8, 11

.edu inlinks count

%

278 120 42 440

63.2 27.3 9.5 100.0

Results showed that despite the strongest correlation between the .edu inlinks and scholarly publishing measure in Iran, no links were created for formal scholarly reasons, equivalent to journal or proceedings citations. 27% of links were created for informal scholarly communication reasons. The Majority of the inlinks, 63%, were created for gratuitous or navigational reasons and about 10% were related to non-academic motivations. The majority of link creation motivations (36%) were from the Iranian (or American born Iranian) students or lecturers’ homepages in the American universities to their previous university homepages in Iran, where they have generally obtained their undergraduate or postgraduate degrees. Initial manual checking for discovering the number of unique sources of inlinks to Iranian academic space showed that more than 50% of them are created from students/lecturers’ homepages in the American universities. Consequently, the interesting question is that why this type of link creation is the most common motivations for targeting the Iranian web space. Further research is considered necessary to find some explanations for this kind of the common link creation motivation in the Iranian academic space. The following evidence surrounding the migration of the Iranian professionals and highly educated people can probably provide mainly sociological explanations for why majority of the links creation are related to this kind of motivation. According to International Monetary Fund (IMF) report, Iran has the first place among 91 countries in migrating highly educated people. Moreover, it is estimated that within last 3 years, out of 125 Iranian award wining students in the world’s scientific Olympiads, 90 students are counting their higher education (undergraduate or postgraduate) in the American universities (BBC WORLD, 2003). The working paper of International Monetary Fund in 1998 on migration rates to the United States in 1998 by tertiary education indicates that Iran is in the second place among Asian countries (Carrington & Detragiache, 1998). The hypothesis that link creations in the Iranian national academic system are probably influenced mainly by sociological issues (such as immigration of highly educated people) is interesting to be tested through followup studies. As result of a study showed that the quantity of research produced by academics was the main reason for attracting links (Thelwall & Harries, 2004), it can be assumed that in the case of Iran, the quantity of immigration of Iranian highly educated people for working or continuing education in the American universities is the main explanation for attacking links. Thus, it would be motivating to see how motivations for international links vary by country, especially among countries with higher brain drain rates and if there is a significantly different range of reasons for linking to one country than others. It seems that link creation motivations in different national academic web spaces can help researchers to find some answers for such questions. Results of this study and pervious researches can be considered as evidences that very few hyperlinks between academic sites are created for formal scholarly communication. 

As shown for example in tables 3 and 4, considerable numbers of inlinks were from the repetitive sources.

11

7 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. BBC WORLD, Persian. (2003). “Iran has the first place in brain drain”. 16/06/2003, Available: http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/iran/030612_h-ag-braindrain.shtml Borgman, C. & Furner, J. (2002). Scholarly communication and bibliometrics. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 36, Medford, NJ: Information Today Inc., pp. 3-72. Carrington, J. & Detragiache. (1998). How big is the brain drain. Working paper of the International Monetary Fund, Available: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/wp98102.pdf Herring, S.D. (2002). Use of electronic resources in scholarly electronic journals: A citation analysis. College and Research Libraries, 63(4), 334-340. Ingwersen, P. (1998). The calculation of Web Impact Factors. Journal of Documentation, 54(2), 236-243. Kim, H.J. (2000). Motivations for hyperlinking in scholarly electronic articles: A qualitative study. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51(10), 887-899. Iran’s national report on ranking universities based on their scholarly articles indexed by ISI in 2002 (2002). Available: http://www.redmi.org/arzyabi/list.htm [accessed 12 December 2003]. Rousseau, R. (1997). Sitations: An exploratory study. Cybermetrics, 1(1), Available: http://www.cindoc.csic.es/cybermetrics/articles/v2i1p2.html Smith, A.G. & Thelwall, M. (2002). Web Impact Factors for Australasian universities. Scientometrics, 54(3), 363-380. Thelwall, M. (2001a). Extracting macroscopic information from web links. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 52 (13), 1157-1168. Thelwall, M. (2001b). The responsiveness of search engine indexes. Cybermetrics, 5(1), http://www.cindoc.csic.es/cybermetrics/articles/v5i1p1.html Thelwall, M. (2002). A comparison of sources of links for academic Web Impact Factor calculations. Journal of Documentation, 58(1), 60-72. Thelwall, M. (2003). What is this link doing here? Beginning a fine-grained process of identifying reasons for academic hyperlink creation, Information Research, 8(3), paper no. 151. Available: http://informationr.net/ir/8-3/paper151.html Thelwall, M. (2004). RE: Inconsistence results in AV. (Email communication). From to . January 15, 2004 Thelwall, M. & Harries, G. (2003). The connection between the research of a university and counts of links to its Web pages: An investigation based upon a classification of the relationships of pages to the research of the host university. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 54(7), 594-602. Thelwall, M., & Harries, G. (2004). Do better scholars’ web publications have significantly higher online impact? Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55(2), 149-159. Thelwall, M. & Tang, R. (2003). Disciplinary and linguistic considerations for academic Web linking: An exploratory hyperlink mediated study with Mainland China and Taiwan. Scientometrics, 58(1), 153-179. Thelwall, M., Vaughan, L., Cothey, V., Li, X. & Smith, A. G. (2003). Which academic subjects have most online impact? A pilot study and a new classification process. Online Information Review, 27(5). Thelwall, Vaughan and Björneborn . (in press). Webometrics. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 39. 12

Vaughan, L. & Hysen, K. (2002). Relationship between links to journal web sites and Impact Factors. Aslib Proceedings. 54(6), 356-361. Vaughan, L. & Thelwall, M. (2003). Scholarly use of the Web: What are the key inducers of links to journal web sites? Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 54(1), 29-38. Vaughan, L. & Thelwall, M. (in press). A modeling approach to uncover hyperlink patterns: The case of Canadian universities. Information Processing & Management Vaughan, L. & Thelwall, M. (2004, in press). Search engine coverage bias: evidence and possible causes. Information Processing & Management. Wilkinson, D., Harries, G., Thelwall, M. & Price, E. (2003). Motivations for academic Web site interlinking: Evidence for the Web as a novel source of information on informal scholarly communication, Journal of Information Science. 29(1), 59-66. Wormell, I. (1998). Informetrics: an emerging subdiscipline in information science. Asian Libraries, 7 (10), 257-268.

13