Patterns of international and national web inlinks to US university departments: a webometric analysis of disciplinary specificity

摘要

An investigation of links to 89 US academic departments from three different disciplines gave insights into the kinds of international regions and national domains that linked to them. Here we describe our data collection and analysis procedure. While we found significant correlations between total counts of international inlinks and total publication impact in Psychology and Chemistry, counts of international inlinks to History departments were too small to form a significant correlation. The correlations suggest that international links may provide evidence of scholarly communication patterns. History departments attracted a significantly lower percentage of international inlinks than to those of Chemistry and Psychology, but the main source of links for all three disciplines was from Europe. Analyses of mainly national inlinks, characterized by gTLDs (generic Top Level Domains), showed that the major source of links for all disciplines was . edu sites, followed by . com, . org, .net. As a whole, regional disciplinary differences were stranger man gTLD differences, although both differences were small. This could be surprising, given the choice of a hard science, a social science and a humanities discipline.