Linking to Institutional Repositories from the general Web

1. Linking to Institutional Repositories from the general Web Alastair G Smith School of Information Management Victoria University of Wellington New Zealand

2. 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

3. General Research Question • Are IRs in fact contributing to research communication, and is this reflected in, for example, citation impact?

4. 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... )

5. Specific research question • What kind of links are made from the general web to IRs?

6. Methodology • Used Yahoo Site Explorer (YSE) to find links to IRs • Classified links as formal, informal, subject

7. 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

8. 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

9. Yahoo Site Explorer interface

10. 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

11. Results

12. 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

13. Impact factor comparison

14. 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

15. Influence of single document on small server

16. 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

17. 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