Do Mendeley reader counts indicate the value of arts and humanities research?

Mendeley reader counts are a good source of early impact evidence for the life and natural sciences articles because they are abundant, appear before citations, and correlate moderately or strongly with citations in the long term. Early studies have found less promising results for the humanities and this article assesses whether the situation has now changed. Using Mendeley reader counts for articles in 12 arts and humanities Scopus subcategories, the results show that Mendeley reader counts reflect Scopus citation counts in most arts and humanities as strongly as in other areas of scholarship. Thus, Mendeley can be used as an early citation impact indicator in the arts and humanities, although it is unclear whether reader or citation counts reflect the underlying value of arts and humanities research.

An investigation of the online presence of UK universities on Instagram

Purpose

Rising tuition fees and a growing importance on league tables has meant that university branding is becoming more of a necessity to attract prospective staff, students, and funding. Whilst university websites are an important branding tool, academic institutions are also beginning to exploit social media. Image-based social media services such as Instagram are particularly popular at the moment. It is therefore logical for universities to have a presence on popular image-based social media services such as Instagram. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the online presence of UK universities on Instagram in an initial investigation of use.

Design/methodology/approach

This study utilizes webometric data collection, and content analysis methodology.

Findings

The results indicate that at the time of data analysis for this investigation (In the Spring of 2015), UK universities had a limited presence on Instagram for general university accounts, with only 51 out of 128 institutions having an account. The most common types of images posted were humanizing (31.0 percent), showcasing (28.8 percent), and orienting (14.3 percent). Orienting images were more likely to receive likes than other image types, and crowdsourcing images were more likely to receive comments.

Originality/value

This paper gives a valuable insight into the image posting practices of UK universities on Instagram. The findings are of value to heads of marketing, online content creators, social media campaign managers, and anyone who is responsible for the marketing, branding, and promoting of a university’s services.

Reader and author gender and genre in Goodreads

There are known gender differences in book preferences in terms of both genre and author gender but their extent and causes are not well understood. It is unclear whether reader preferences for author genders occur within any or all genres and whether readers evaluate books differently based on author genders within specific genres. This article exploits a major source of informal book reviews, the Goodreads.com website, to assess the influence of reader and author genders on book evaluations within genres. It uses a quantitative analysis of 201,560 books and their reviews, focusing on the top 50 user-specified genres. The results show strong gender differences in the ratings given by reviewers to books within genres, such as female reviewers rating contemporary romance more highly, with males preferring short stories. For most common book genres, reviewers give higher ratings to books authored by their own gender, confirming that gender bias is not confined to the literary elite. The main exception is the comic book, for which male reviewers prefer female authors, despite their scarcity. A word frequency analysis suggested that authors wrote, and reviewers valued, gendered aspects of books within a genre. For example, relationships and romance were disproportionately mentioned by women in mystery and fantasy novels. These results show that, perhaps for the first time, it is possible to get large-scale evidence about the reception of books by typical readers, if they post reviews online.

Hyperlinks as a data source for science mapping

Hyperlinks between academic web sites, like citations, can potentially be used to map disciplinary structures and identify evidence of connections between disciplines. In this paper we classified a sample of links originating in three different disciplines: maths, physics and sociology. Links within a discipline were found to be different in character to links between pages in different disciplines. There were also disciplinary differences in both types of link. As a consequence, we argue that interpretations of web science maps covering multiple disciplines will need to be sensitive to the contexts of the links mapped.

A web crawler design for data mining

The content of the web has increasingly become a focus for academic research. Computer programs are needed in order to conduct any large-scale processing of web pages, requiring the use of a web crawler at some stage in order to fetch the pages to be analysed. The processing of the text of web pages in order to extract information can be expensive in terms of processor time. Consequently a distributed design is proposed in order to effectively use idle computing resources and to help information scientists avoid the need to employ dedicated equipment. A system developed using the model is examined and the advantages and limitations of the approach are discussed.

Motivations for academic web site interlinking: evidence for the Web as a novel source of information on informal scholarly communication

The need to understand authors’ motivations for creating links between university web sites is addressed by a survey of a random collection of 414 such links from the ac.uk domain. A classification scheme was created and applied to this collection. Obtaining inter-classifier agreement as to the single main link creation cause was very difficult because of multiple potential motivations and the fluidity of genre on the Web. Nevertheless, it was clear that, whilst the vast majority, over 90%, was created for broadly scholarly reasons, only two were equivalent to journal citations. It is concluded that academic web link metrics will be dominated by a range of informal types of scholarly communication. Since formal communication can be extensively studied through citation analysis, this provides an exciting new window through which to investigate a facet of a previously obscured type of communication activity.

The top 100 linked-to pages on UK university web sites: high inlink counts are not usually associated with quality scholarly content

High citation counts are usually indicators of high-quality research, but is the same true for counts of links to academic web pages? The belief that links can be used to indicate quality or utility on the Web in general drives the highly successful search engine Google, lending additional pertinence to this question. The 100 highest linked-to pages on university web sites were obtained from link counts between institutions in the UK, excluding same university links. The results split into two parts. (1) It is discovered that 23 of the original top pages owed their high counts to the automatic inclusion of links in web pages on other sites, usually on one other university site. It is concluded that simple link counts are highly unreliable indicators of the average behaviour of scholars. (2) After excluding these 23 pages only one of the top 100 contained scholarly content equivalent to a journal article, although several were e-journals or databases of academic publications. Aside from the 45 university home pages, the most common targets were collections of external links and home pages of collections of subject-specific information or resources. It is concluded that the most highly linked-to pages are those that facilitate access to a wide range of information, rather than providing specific content. Implications of these two findings for the newly emerging area of cybermetrics are discussed.

Web use and peer interconnectivity metrics for academic web sites

This paper introduces two new web link count metrics to complement the existing Web Impact Factor. The first is provisionally cast as an indicator of the average degree of online informal scholarly communication and information use by the academics in a given university. The second has a similar construction but focuses on the degree of web interconnection in terms of both inlinks and outlinks. The latter metric is based upon a more elaborate mechanism than raw link counts: totalling the minimum number of links between universities over all distinct pairs in the chosen set that include the given institution. Statistical tests give evidence that the results of both correlate with institutional research productivity in the UK, providing preliminary support for their continued development. Further research is needed into causes of linking in order to allow more meaningful interpretations of their values to be made.

Why Do Web Sites from Different Academic Subjects Interlink?

On the Web, hyperlinks have been used both to assess the impact of academic Web sites and to trace aspects of online informal scholarly communication. They are also used in Web information retrieval algorithms to identify important pages and to cluster pages by topic, both of which help in ranking search engine results. In this paper we investigate a type of link that is of particular interest for all of these applications: one that crosses subject boundaries. We took a sample of 586 linked pairs of domains in different UK academic sites, and extracted those that represented different subjects, resulting in 52 pairs of domains with different subjects. These were then grouped by the type of relationship between the source and target page. Over a third of the links formed a scholarly connection between similar subjects, but in 8% of cases dissimilar subjects also had a scholarly connection. Additionally, higher education teaching links were seen to form an extensive crossdisciplinary network, accounting for 19% of the links. A significant number of links (12%) also targeted nonsubjectspecific general resources. The results suggest that mapping disciplinary collaboration on the Web should be feasible but that this process and topic identification in academic Webs would both be helped by the prior removal of key higher education teaching and popular general pages from the data set. These, and computing pages to a lesser extent, play a role more pernicious than ‘stop words’ in traditional information retrieval. The conclusions are of a qualitative rather than quantitative nature because of the small effective sample size, so an initial set of thousands of links would be required to remedy this.

Exploring the link structure of the Web with network diagrams

Web links are used both to connect pages within a web site and to refer to information and resources elsewhere. For pages that are linked to, backlinks are not only a potential source of visitors but an expression of interest in the page contents as well. Links also allow search engine crawlers to index a fraction of the web and are used by some of them to rate target page quality. Hyperlinks are, therefore, important in their own right but are also of sociological interest as arte-facts of predominantly human activity. This article explores the network diagram as a tool to visualize the strength of the interconnection between areas of the web. It is reported that four different link count based weightings are possible, each highlighting a different aspect of the data.