The development of Web link indicators to measure the impact of STI research Web sites

Objectives

One methodological approach to measure the impact of a web site is to analyse the structure of the links targeted at the site. A metric based upon link and page counts, the Web Impact Factor will further developed into a tool for measuring the impact of STI research web sites.

Description of work/Methodology

The project has two parts:

1. A study of why web authors create links to STI research sites (motivation study).
2. A preliminary data gathering exercise (series of web crawls) for web links followed by a statistical analysis and the construction of a mathematical model for the linking process.This basic research will be followed by the construction of metrics appropriate for measuring various aspects of the impact of these web sites. A pilot study will be conducted to assess their relevance.Initial research will be open to the development of new methodologies that would allow the identification of gender from Web pages, for example official lists of Web pages with gender information in a form that can be automatically extracted by a program.