Books+ Search Results
Introduction to webometrics quantitative web research for the social sciences
Author
Title
Introduction to webometrics [electronic resource] : quantitative web research for the social sciences / Michael Thelwall.
ISBN
9781598299946 (electronic bk.)
9781598299939 (pbk.)
Published
San Rafael, Calif. (1537 Fourth Street, San Rafael, CA 94901 USA) : Morgan & Claypool Publishers, c2009.
Physical Description
1 online resource (ix, 115 p. : ill.) : digital file.
Local Notes
Access is available to the Yale community.
Notes
Part of: Synthesis digital library of engineering and computer science.
Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on May 8, 2009).
Series from website.
Access and use
Access restricted by licensing agreement.
Summary
Webometrics is concerned with measuring aspects of the web: web sites, web pages, parts of web pages, words in web pages, hyperlinks, web search engine results. The importance of the web itself as a communication medium and for hosting an increasingly wide array of documents, from journal articles to holiday brochures, needs no introduction. Given this huge and easily accessible source of information, there are limitless possibilities for measuring or counting on a huge scale (e.g., the number of web sites, the number of web pages, the number of blogs) or on a smaller scale (e.g., the number of web sites in Ireland, the number of web pages in the CNN web site, the number of blogs mentioning Barack Obama before the 2008 presidential campaign). This book argues that it can be useful for social scientists to measure aspects of the web and explains how this can be achieved on both a small and large scale. The book is intended for social scientists with research topics that are wholly or partly online (e.g., social networks, news, political communication) and social scientists with offline research topics with an online reflection, even if this is not a core component (e.g., diaspora communities, consumer culture, linguistic change). The book is also intended for library and information science students in the belief that the knowledge and techniques described will be useful for them to guide and aid other social scientists in their research. In addition, the techniques and issues are all directly relevant to library and information science research problems.
Variant and related titles
Synthesis digital library of engineering and computer science.
Other formats
Also available in print.
Format
Books / Online
Language
English
Added to Catalog
April 25, 2013
Series
Synthesis lectures on information concepts, retrieval, and services ; # 4
System details note
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
System requirements: Adobe Acrobat reader.
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (p. 107-114).
Contents
Introduction
New problems: web-based phenomena
Old problems: offline phenomena reflected online
History and definition
Book overview
Web impact assessment
Web impact assessment via web mentions
Bespoke web citation indexes
Content analysis
Category choices
Sampling methods
Example
Validity
URL analysis of the spread of results
Web impact reports
Web citation analysis, an information science application
Advanced web impact studies
Summary
Link analysis
Background: link counts as a type of information
Types of webometric link analysis
Link impact assessments
Interpreting the results
Alternative link counting methods
Case study: links to ZigZagMag.com
Content analysis of links
Link relationship mapping
Case studies
Colink relationship mapping
Link impact reports
Large-scale link analysis with multiple site groups
Link differences between sectors, an information science application
Summary
Blog searching
Blog search engines
Date-specific searches
Trend detection
Checking trend detection results
Limitations of blog data
Advanced blog analysis techniques
Summary
Automatic search engine searches: LexiURL searcher
Introduction to LexiURL searcher
LexiURL searcher web impact reports
Web impact reports, classic interface example
LexiURL searcher link impact reports
Link impact reports, classic interface example
LexiURL searcher for network diagrams
Rearranging, saving, and printing network diagrams
Network diagram, classic interface example
Colink network diagrams
LexiURL searcher additional features
Web crawling: SocSciBot
Web crawlers
Overview of SocSciBot
Network diagrams of sets of web sites with SocSciBot
Other uses for web crawls
Search engines and data reliability
Search engine architecture
Duplicate and near-duplicate elimination
Comparing different search engines
Research into search engine results
Modeling the web's link structure
Tracking user actions online
Single-site web analytics and log file analysis
Multiple-site web analytics
Search engine log file analysis
Advanced techniques
Query splitting
Virtual memetics
Web issue analysis
Data mining social network sites
Social network analysis and small worlds
Folksonomy tagging
API programming and mashups
Summary and future directions
Glossary
References.
Subjects
Bookmark As
Citation
