The freshness of web search engine databases
Journal of Information Science
Extracting accurate and complete results from search engines: Case study windows live
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
The Internet Audience: Constitution & Measurement
The Internet Audience: Constitution & Measurement
Mapping world-class universities on the web
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Webometric analysis of departments of librarianship and information science: a follow-up study
Journal of Information Science
Investigation of the accuracy of search engine hit counts
Journal of Information Science
Introduction to Webometrics: Quantitative Web Research for the Social Sciences
Introduction to Webometrics: Quantitative Web Research for the Social Sciences
Journal of Information Science
A comparison of methods for collecting web citation data for academic organizations
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
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The main goal of this research is to analyze the web structure and performance of units and services belonging to U.S. academic libraries in order to check their suitability for webometric studies. Our objectives include studying their possible correlation with economic data and assessing their use for complementary evaluation purposes. We conducted a survey of library homepages, institutional repositories, digital collections, and online catalogs (a total of 374 URLs) belonging to the 100 U.S. universities with the highest total expenditures in academic libraries according to data provided by the National Center for Education Statistics. Several data points were taken and analyzed, including web variables (page count, external links, and visits) and economic variables (total expenditures, expenditures on printed and electronic books, and physical visits). The results indicate that the variety of URL syntaxes is wide, diverse and complex, which produces a misrepresentation of academic libraries' web resources and reduces the accuracy of web analysis. On the other hand, institutional and web data indicators are not highly correlated. Better results are obtained by correlating total library expenditures with URL mentions measured by Google (r = 0.546) and visits measured by Compete (r = 0.573), respectively. Because correlation values obtained are not highly significant, we estimate such correlations will increase if users can avoid linkage problems (due to the complexity of URLs) and gain direct access to log files (for more accurate data about visits).