Kosyakov D.V.   Guskov A.   Bykhovtsev E.S.  

Webometric Analysis of Russian Academic and Education Web

Reporter: Kosyakov D.V.

In recent years, webometric studies based on web search engine usage [1-3], become a recognized method of measurement of academic institution’s websites quality and impact. However, as other infometric studies this method remains quite controversial due to gaps in research base, quality of measurement instrumentation and weight and meaning of measured indicators. We suppose that there is a lack of nationwide recurring measurements and juxtaposition between webometric and other kinds of scientometric assessments.
This research is based on monthly webometric data collection started in January, 2015 for over than 2000 Russian research organizations and higher education institutions websites. For each website, the following indicators are collected: the number of webpages and the number of documents (according to Google, Yandex and Bing), the number of references and referenced domains (according to Ahrefs and Majestic services), the number of documents indexed by Google Scholar, and Yandex Topic Citation Index. Deep analysis of time series of measurements of particular webometric indicators in some cases combined with the parsing of website structure, examining its peculiarities, and correlating with usage statistics [4] allowed us to examine in details the significance of each of indicators, propose some justification methods and to compare different approaches to webometrics rankings calculations.
In this report, we consider the principles and architecture of the webometric data collecting system. It contains a webometric indicators database with monthly data since January, 2015, and web interface (http://www.webometrix.ru), that allows anyone to perform an analysis of trends and evolution of the scientific web sites. Institutions can use it to examine the position and dynamics of their website, to compare it with the others and, as a result, to find the ways of its improvement.
In the final part of the report, we made an overview of the Russian Academic and Education Web. We also compared webometric rankings with bibliometric data on institutions’ academic output and web site usage statistics.

References
[1] J. Bar-Ilan, "The use of web search engines in information science research", Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 38, 231 (2004).
[2] I.F. Aguillo, J.L. Ortega, M. Fernández, Webometric Ranking of World Universities, Higher Education in Europe, 33, 233 (2008).
[3] Yu.I. Shokin, O.A. Klimenko, E.V. Rychkova, I.V. Shabalnikov, Website ranking of scientific institutions of SB RAS. Computational Technologies, 13, 128 (2008).
[4] A. E. Guskov, E. S. Bykhovtsev, D. V. Kosyakov, Alternative Webometrics: Study of the Traffic of the Websites of Scientific Organizations, Scientific and Technical Information Processing, series 1, 12, 12 (2015).