Abstract
The method of co-link was proposed in 1996 and since then it has been applied in many Webometric studies. Its definition refers to “page co-link analysis”, as links are provided by URLs or pages. This paper presents a new methodological approach, a “site co-link analysis”, to investigate relations in small networks. The Oswaldo Cruz Foundation institutes were used as a case study. The results indicate that the number of co-links provided by sites led to an increase of 133% in the sample analyzed. In a cluster analysis, three clusters were formed mainly for thematic reasons and four institutes remained isolated.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
www.fiocruz.br (2008).
References
Björneborn, L., & Ingwersen, P. (2004). Towards a basic framework of Webometrics. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55(14), 1216–1227.
Chu, H., He, S., & Thelwall, M. (2002). Library and information science schools in Canada and USA: A webometric perspective. Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, 43(2), 110–125.
Cothey, V., Aguillo, I., & Arroyo, N. (2006). Operationalising “Websites”: Lexically, semantically or topologically? Cybermetrics, 10(1), paper 3.
Gouveia, F. C., & Kurtenbach, E. (2009). Mapping the web relations of science centres and museums from Latin America. Scientometrics, 79(3), 491–505.
Gulli, A., & Signorini, A. (2005). The Indexable Web is More than 11.5 billion pages. International World Wide Web Conference (pp. 902–903). http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~asignori/web-size/size-indexable-web.pdf.
Heimeriks, G., Horlesberger, M., & Van Den Besselaar, P. (2003). Mapping communication and collaboration in heterogeneous research networks. Scientometrics, 58(2), 391–413.
Herrero-Solana, V., & Morales-del-Castillo, J. (2004). “Geopolitical” maps of the Internet: Application of new information representation methods. Ciência da Informação, 33(3), 69–75.
Lang, P., Gouveia, F. C., & Leta, J. (2008). Relações Intra-institucionais na Internet: um estudo exploratório com base em metodologias webométricas. Perspectivas em Ciência da Informação, 13(3), 137–150.
Larson, R. (1996). Bibliometrics of the world wide web: An exploratory analysis of the intellectual structure of the cyberspace. In Proceedings of the annual meeting of the American Society of information science.
Ortega, J., & Aguillo, I. (2007). Spain’s academic web space in the European Higher Education Area: An exploratory approach. Profesional de la Informacion, 16, 417–425.
Ortega, J., & Aguillo, I. (2008). Visualization of the Nordic academic web: Link analysis using social network tools. Information Processing & Management, 44(4), 1624–1633.
Prime, C., Bassecoulard, E., & Zitt, M. (2002). Co-citations and co-sitations: A cautionary view on an analogy. Scientometrics, 54(2), 291–308.
Smith, A. (2004). Web links as analogues of citations. Information Research, 9(4), paper 188. http://InformationR.net/ir/9-4/paper188.html.
Thelwall, M. (2002). Evidence for the existence of geographic trends in university Web site interlinking. Journal of Documentation, 58(2), 563–574.
Thelwall, M., & Wilkinson, D. (2008). A generic lexical URL segmentation framework for counting links, colinks or URLs. Library and Information Science Research, 30(2), 94–101.
Vaughan, L. (2006). Visualizing linguistic and cultural differences using web co-link data. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57(9), 178–1193.
Vaughan, L., Kipp, M., & Gao, Y. (2007a). Why are websites co-linked? The case of Canadian universities. Scientometrics, 72(1), 81–92.
Vaughan, L., Tang, J., & Du, J. (2007b). Exploring web co-link patterns for business intelligence: The case of two Chinese industries. Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science-Revue Canadienne des Sciences de L’Information et de Bibliotheconomie, 31(3–4), 278.
Vaughan, L., & Thelwall, M. (2005). A modeling approach to uncover hyperlink patterns: The case of Canadian universities. Information Processing and Management, 41(2), 47–359.
Vaughan, L., & You, J. (2006). Comparing business competition positions based on Web co-link data: The global market vs. the Chinese market. Scientometrics, 68(3), 611–628.
Ward, J. (1963). Hierarchical grouping to optimize an objective function. Journal of American Statistical Association, 58(301), 236–244.
Zuccala, A. (2006). Author cocitation analysis is to intellectual structure as web co-link analysis is to… ? Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57(11), 1487–1502.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lang, P., Gouveia, F.C. & Leta, J. Site co-link analysis applied to small networks: a new methodological approach. Scientometrics 83, 157–166 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-009-0092-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-009-0092-0