Are web mentions accurate substitutes for inlinks for Spanish universities?
| Date | 08 January 2014 |
| Published date | 08 January 2014 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-10-2012-0189 |
| Pages | 59-77 |
| Author | José Luis Ortega,Enrique Orduña-Malea,Isidro F. Aguillo |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval |
Are web mentions accurate
substitutes for inlinks for Spanish
universities?
Jose
´Luis Ortega
Vice-presidency for Scientific and Technological Research,
Spanish National Research Council, Madrid, Spain
Enrique Ordun
˜a-Malea
EC3 Research Group and Institute of Design and Manufacturing,
Polytechnic University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain, and
Isidro F. Aguillo
Institute of Public Goods and Policies, Spanish National Research Council,
Madrid, Spain
Abstract
Purpose – Title and URL mentions have recently been proposed as web visibility indicators instead
of inlink counts. The objective of this study is to determine the accuracy of these alternative web
mention indicators in the Spanish academic system, taking into account their complexity
(multi-domains) and diversity (different official languages).
Design/methodology/approach – Inlinks, title and URL mentions from 76 Spanish universities were
manually extracted from the main search engines (Google, Google Scholar, Yahoo!, Bing and Exalead).
Several statistical methods, such as correlation, difference tests and regression models, were used.
Findings – Web mentions, despite some limitations, can be used as substitutes for inlinks in the
Spanish academic system, although these indicators are more likely to be influenced by the
environment (language, web domain policy, etc.) than inlinks.
Research limitations/implications – Title mentions provide unstable results caused by the
multiple name variants which an institution can present (such as acronyms and other language
versions). URL mentions are more stable, but they may present atypical points due to some
shortcomings, the effect of which is that URL mentions do not have the same meaning as inlinks.
Practical implications – Web mentions should be used with caution and after a cleaning-up
process. Moreover, these counts do not necessarily signify connectivity, so their use in global web
analysis should be limited.
Originality/value – Web mentions have previously been used in some specific academic systems
(US, UK and China), but this study analyses, in depth and for the first time, an entire non-English
speaking European country (Spain), with complex academic web behaviour, which helps to better
explain previous web mention results.
Keywords Search engines,Webometrics, Universities, Link analysis,Spain, Web mentions
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
University web sites have gradually become complex systems of dynamic information
where both institutions and services are linked and potentially accessible from a
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Web mentions
59
Received 23 October 2012
First revision accepted
1 March 2013
Second revision accepted
9 March 2013
Online Information Review
Vol. 38 No. 1, 2014
pp. 59-77
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/OIR-10-2012-0189
general URL to potential users such as students, teachers, researchers, companies , and
so on (Ordun
˜a-Malea and Ontalba-Ruipe
´rez, 2013).
The quantitative analysis of all the data contained within these online systems
could bring to light information unobtainable through other research methods such as
bibliometrics (Aguillo, 2009), providing a complementary understanding of general
university performance. The design of university web rankings constitutes an example
of the applied use of web data in the creation of university evaluation tools,
e.g. Ranking Web of World Universities (www.webometrics.info) and four
International Colleges and Universities (www.4icu.org).
The discipline of cybermetrics provides the theoretical basis and methodology
necessary for a quantitative analysis of the information contained on university web
sites (Bjo
¨rneborn and Ingwersen, 2004), but the heavy reliance of this discipline on
search engines to collect web data means that the most accurate and available web
indicators (especially inlink counts) and appropriate procedures (Thelwall and Sud,
2012) for obtaining these data have to be reviewed periodically.
Recently, due to an important change in the search engine market (commented on
later), title and URL mentions have been proposed as web visibility indicators instead
of the traditional inlink counts for specific academic environments (China, the UK and
the US). The main objective of this study is to determine whether these alternative web
mention indicators could be generalised to other university systems (especially in the
Spanish academic web system) and consequently be employed, particularly in global
university web rankings.
In order to address this question, a description of a key event in the search
market with several implications for webometric methodologies (agreement between
Microsoft and Yahoo!), and the main actions carried out by the scientific community
to avoid them (mainly the proposal of alternative indicators and sources) are
provided in the following. After this, a gap in research (the widespread use of
alternative web mention indicators and their application in global web rankings) is
identified and commented on. Finally, and in view of this gap, specific research
objectives are set out.
Web search market changes
Recently the web search market has undergone important changes that have affected
the availability of data on linking relationships between web sites and domains.
Previously the most reliable sources (and those with the largest coverage for extracting
data on linking patterns) were the Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Search Explorer (YSE)
databases. However in July 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a commercial and
technological agreement in which, among other things, Bing would be the exclusiv e
search engine for both companies (The Washington Post, 2009). Since Bing did not
support the “link:” and “linkdomain:” advanced query operators (Seidman, 2007), the
possibility of obtaining this type of information was jeopardised.
Empirical testing showed that this integration took place around October 2011,
while the “link:” and “linkdomain:” operators gradually disappeared from each local
search portal. In November 2011, therefore, YSE turned off the service permanently,
and the main source for large-scale selective link information thus disappeared.
Today the only general search engine that supports link searches (selecting source
and target) is Exalead, but its coverage is not only relatively limited but also has a
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