Patterns of national and international Web inlinks to US academic departments: An analysis of disciplinary variations

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. While significant correlations were found 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 give a significant result. The correlations suggest that international links may reflect, to a certain extent, patterns of scholarly communication. Even though History departments attracted a significantly lower percentage of international inlinks than those of Chemistry and Psychology, the main source of links for all three disciplines was from Europe. Analyses of 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, international regional differences in disciplines were stronger than gTLD differences, although in both cases discrepancies were not of a large scale.