Webometric Link Analysis

Webometric link analysis treats hyperlinks the way bibliometrics treats citations: as traces of influence and visibility that can be counted and analyzed. The central indicator, Peter Ingwersen's 1998 Web Impact Factor, divides the number of links pointing to a web unit, a site, domain, or institution, by its number of pages, producing a link-density measure analogous to a journal impact factor. Mike Thelwall's Link Analysis: An Information Science Approach (2004) developed the broader methodology, showing how hyperlink counts and link networks can serve as evidence about online phenomena while warning carefully about the reliability of the underlying data. Distinct from generic scientometric citation mapping, webometric link analysis measures impact on the web itself, the visibility of universities, libraries, journals, and organizations as expressed through who links to them.