Graph structure in three national academic webs: power laws with anomalies

  • Authors:

  • Mike Thelwall;David Wilkinson

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Computing and Information Technology, University of Wolverhampton, Wulfruna Street, Wolverhampton WV1 1SB, UK;School of Computing and Information Technology, University of Wolverhampton, Wulfruna Street, Wolverhampton WV1 1SB, UK

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

The graph structures of three national university publicly indexable Webs from Australia, New Zealand, and the UK were analyzed. Strong scale-free regularities for page indegrees, outdegrees, and connected component sizes were in evidence, resulting in power laws similar to those previously identified for individual university Web sites and for the AltaVista-indexed Web. Anomalies were also discovered in most distributions and were tracked down to root causes. As a result, resource driven Web sites and automatically generated pages were identified as representing a significant break from the assumptions of previous power law models. It follows that attempts to track average Web linking behavior would benefit from using techniques to minimize or eliminate the impact of such anomalies.