Linking to Institutional Repositories from the general Web

Alastair G SmithSchool of Information Management

Victoria University of Wellington New Zealand

Institutional Repositories (IRs) Becoming an important form of

research publishing Purposes:

Open access to research Preservation and availability of research

outputs (e.g. theses) Showcasing institution’s research output Facilitating communication between

researchers

General Research Question

Are IRs in fact contributing to research communication, and is this reflected in, for example, citation impact?

Citation study of IRs: issues Citations may not include the information

that the document was found in an IR ISI, Scopus don’t search for references to

an IR Google Scholar does not search for links

to an IR Document in IR may have multiple URLs

(IR specific, persistent http://hdl.handle.net... )

Specific research question

What kind of links are made from the general web to IRs?

Methodology

Used Yahoo Site Explorer (YSE) to find links to IRs

Classified links as formal, informal, subject

Institutional Repositories New Zealand

Auckland University of Technology Lincoln University University of Auckland University of Canterbury University of Otago Victoria University of Wellington Waikato University

Overseas Australian National University Queensland University of Technology University of Southampton

Yahoo Site Explorer Offered the best facilities for

searching for inlinks to a particular site at time of research

Provides a list of sites that link to a given website

Allows the list of linking pages to be downloaded to a spreadsheet

Sample of 100 links classified

Yahoo Site Explorer interface

Classification scheme Based on Kousha & Thelwall, 2007

Formal: Formally cited research in journals, conference proceedings, online magazine etc.

Informal: links from blogs, Wikipedia, etc Self publicity: link from author’s website Subject/directory links: link from

general or subject specific web directory, or from directory of IRs

Results

Formal research links: equivalent to citations

2%

Informal research links: links from sources that do not have print equivalents

18%

Directory links: made to documents because of their informational value

50%

Impact factors

Research IF: formal and informal links made from other documents to the research content; divided by number of documents in IR

Subject IF: all links made to IR documents because of their information value, including subject directories; divided by number of documents in IR

Impact factor comparisonV

UW

UA

uck

UC

anty

UO

tago

LiU

WaiU

AU

T

AN

U

QU

T

Soto

n

0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

0.9

Institution

ResearchIF

Subject IF

Observations Few links are formal citations Larger, more mature IRs (ANU, QUT,

Soton) have higher proportions of formal, informal, and significant links

High impact factors for QUT and Soton: due to mandatory deposit of publications?

In less mature IRs, impact can be influenced by a few well linked articles

Influence of single document on small server

Public access to research

Study of the carbon produced in producing and transporting food linked from blogs and Wikipedia

Study of bias in football refereeing linked from sports blogs

Significant numbers of links to IRs from Wikipedia

Implications YSE covers general web – further study

needed of links from research web, and from research blogs

As IRs mature, there may be more conventional citations to them

Institutions with high coverage of output achieve high impact factors

Value of IRs may be in making research available to general public