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.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Ingwersen, P. (1998). The calculation of web impact factors. Journal of Documentation, 54(2), 236-243. · DOI 10.1108/EUM0000000007167
- Thelwall, M. (2004). Link Analysis: An Information Science Approach. Amsterdam: Elsevier Academic Press. · ISBN 9780120885534
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.