Abstract
As the web is continuously changing, perhaps growing exponentially since its inception, a major potential problem for webometrics is that web statistics may be obsolete by the time they are published in the academic literature. It is important therefore to know as much as possible about how the web is changing over time. This paper studies the UK, Australian and New Zealand academic webs from 2000 to 2005, finding that the number of static pages and links in each of the three academic webs appears to have stabilised as far back as 2001. This stabilisation may be partly due to increases in dynamic pages which are normally excluded from webometric analyses. Nevertheless, the results are encouraging evidence that webometrics for academic spaces may have a longer-term validity than would have been previously assumed.
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Payne, N., Thelwall, M. A longitudinal study of academic webs: Growth and stabilisation. Scientometrics 71, 523–539 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-007-1695-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-007-1695-y