WEBOMETRICS

The science of webometrics are also known as cyber metrics tries to measure the World Wide Web to get knowledge about the number and types of hyper links, structure of the World Wide web and usage patterns. The term webometrics was first coined by Almind and Ingwersen in1997.

DEFINITION

Ø Webometrics is "the study of the quantitative aspects of the construction and use of information resources, structures and technologies on the Web drawing on bibliometric and info metric approaches."

Ø "The study of web-based content with primarily quantitative methods for social science research goals using techniques that are not specific to one field of study" (Thelwall, 2009)

        "The study of web-based content with primarily quantitative methods for social science research goals Since 2004 the Webometrics ranking of world universities is offering information about more than 6,000 universities ranked according to indicators measuring Web presence and impact (link visibility). There are also Rankings Web devoted to Research Centers, Hospitals, Repositories and Business Schools etc.

    'Web Impact Factor' (WIF) is one of the relatively straightforward measure introduced by Ingwersen (1998). Which (WIF)measure may be defined as the number of web pages in a web site receiving links from other web sites, divided by the number of web pages published in the site that are accessible to the crawler. However the use of WIF has been disregarded due to the mathematical artifacts derived from power law distributions of these variables. Other similar indicators using size of the institution instead of number of web pages have been proved more useful.
    The webometrics Ranking of world universities, also known as Ranking Web of World Universities, is the largest classification of websites of higher education institutions, covering more than 20,000 universities worldwide. The aim of the Ranking is to improve the presence of the academic and research institutions and to promote the open access publication of scientific results. The ranking started in 2004 and it is based on a composite indicator that takes into account both the volume of the Web contents (number of web pages and files) and the visibility and impact of this web publications according to the number of external links (site citations) they received. The ranking is updated every January and July, providing Web indicators for more than 6,000 universities worldwide. The approach takes into account the wide range of scientific activities represented in the academic websites, frequently overlooked by the bibliometric indicators. There are similarly constructed web rankings for research centers, hospitals, business schools and repositories