Measuring informal scientific publication in the Web

Abstract

Cyberscientometrics is becoming a popular topic in the scientific evaluation research front, mainly because it is relatively easy to apply traditional bibliometrics methods to formal electronic journals. Some of the results obtained correlate well with previous studies and major discrepancies are best explained by the not yet fully developed electronic new paradigm. But the Web offers more possibilities for evaluation purposes than those restricted to formal electronic publications. Today in Europe, an important part of the R&D activities are being funded by public taxes, so Society is increasing the demand for a social and economic direct output from these activities and not only papers addressed to a narrow peer audience. Informal web communication can be measured in order to increase the global picture of the scientific activity taken into account results published in personal or institutional websites, not in mainstream journals.

The size of the academic and research-related web is so large that patterns could be discovered for even small organisations or even individual researchers. To show preliminary results of this technique, a case study was done with the rich format documents available from the European University websites. The results show that a huge sample for bibliometric analysis can be compiled in an automatic way and the patterns are geographically and disciplinary meaningful.