A longitudinal study of academic webs: Growth and stabilisation

As the web is continuously changing, perhaps growing exponentially since its inception, a major potential problem for webometrics is that web statistics may be obsolete by the time they are published in the academic literature. It is important therefore to know as much as possible about how the web is changing over time. This paper studies the UK, Australian and New Zealand academic webs from 2000 to 2005, finding that the number of static pages and links in each of the three academic webs appears to have stabilised as far back as 2001. This stabilisation may be partly due to increases in dynamic pages which are normally excluded from webometric analyses. Nevertheless, the results are encouraging evidence that webometrics for academic spaces may have a longer-term validity than would have been previously assumed.

[1]  M. Thelwall,et al.  Library and Information Science Schools in Canada and USA: A Webometric Perspective , 2002 .

[2]  Wallace C. Koehler.  Classifying Web sites and Web pages , 1999 .

[3]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  Conceptualizing documentation on the Web: An evaluation of different heuristic-based models for counting links between university Web sites , 2002, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[4]  Hector Garcia-Molina,et al.  Estimating frequency of change , 2003, TOIT.

[5]  Wolfgang Glänzel,et al.  National characteristics in international scientific co-authorship relations , 2004, Scientometrics.

[6]  Andrei Z. Broder,et al.  Sic transit gloria telae: towards an understanding of the web's decay , 2004, WWW '04.

[7]  George Cybenko,et al.  How dynamic is the Web? , 2000, Comput. Networks.

[8]  D. M. Hutton,et al.  Web Dynamics - Adapting to Change in Content, Size, Topology and Use , 2006 .

[9]  Wallace Koehler,et al.  Web page change and persistence - A four-year longitudinal study , 2002, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[10]  Jon Guice,et al.  Looking Backward and Forward at the Internet , 1998, Inf. Soc..

[11]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  Linguistic patterns of academic Web use in Western Europe , 2004, Scientometrics.

[12]  Judit Bar-Ilan.  Methods for measuring search engine performance over time , 2002, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[13]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  Web Impact Factors for Australasian universities , 2002, Scientometrics.

[14]  Mike McConnell,et al.  Presenting a model for the structure and content of a university World Wide Web site , 1999, J. Inf. Sci..

[15]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  A web crawler design for data mining , 2001, J. Inf. Sci..

[16]  Judit Bar-Ilan,et al.  Evolution, continuity, and disappearance of documents on a specific topic on the Web: A longitudinal study of informetrics , 2004, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[17]  Marc Najork,et al.  A large‐scale study of the evolution of Web pages , 2004, Softw. Pract. Exp..

[18]  Wallace Koehler,et al.  An Analysis of Web Page and Web Site Constancy and Permanence , 1999, J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci..

[19]  Judit Bar-Ilan.  Search engine results over time-a case study on search engine stability , 1998 .

[20]  Wallace Koehler,et al.  A longitudinal study of Web pages continued: a consideration of document persistence , 2003, Inf. Res..

[21]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  A free database of university web links: data collection issues , 2002 .

[22]  Andrei Z. Broder,et al.  Graph structure in the Web , 2000, Comput. Networks.