Annals of Library and Information Studies Vol. 58, December 2011, pp. 307-318 Webometrics study of Universities in Bangladesh Md. Anwarul Islam Assistant Professor, Department of Information Science and Library Management, University of Dhaka, Dhaka-1000, E-mail:[email protected] Very few studies have been conducted on webometrics studies in Bangladesh. But the present article reports webometric study of all university websites in Bangladesh. Data for the study obtained using AltaVista search engine was used to rank the websites based on webometric indicators. It is found that some universities in Bangladesh have higher number of web pages but their link pages are fewer and websites fall behind in their web impact factor. Some suggestions to improve the WIF of the university websites in Bangladesh are given. Introduction and other related purposes. Some leading public and private universities in Bangladesh are using ICT for In the internet age, university websites are very enhancing academic excellence including providing important for to their stakeholders and there is a need library services, online services and web based to assess their ranking1. Webometrics is the study of services to their users. the quantitative aspects of the construction and use of information resources, structures and technologies on the Web, drawing on bibliometric and informetric Webometrics and Web Impact Factor approaches2. It covers research of all network based communication using informetric or other quantitative Different metrics studies in library and information measures. Webometrics, in future, may become one science such as librametrics, bibliometrics, of the most interesting research areas for the vast scientometrics and informetrics are well known. The recent years have witnessed the emergence of collection of electronic information available on the 9 publicly indexable web3. Paisley4 rightly identified webometrics or cybermetrics . Bibliometric tools and this area as the future domain of bibliometric techniques have been used to provide an research. understanding of the dynamics of disciplines, developing policy and justifying research funding. University websites introduce universities, their Since 1996, increasing efforts have been made to related institutions and departments, resources and investigate the web as a significant scholarly medium services, faculty members, students, alumni and so on. for science and scholarship by applying bibliometrics It is beyond doubt that one of the important factors for techniques10. Terms applied to this new area of study the success of a university is its website, web include “webometrics”11. Webometrics is a accessibility and in particular its visibility on the quantitative study of web-related phenomena and 5 web . webometrics studies could be applied to web with commercial search engines providing the raw data12. Bangladesh is a developing country and the present 13 literacy rate of the country is 47.9 percent6. The Bjorneborn and Ingwersen focused on the following University Grants Commission (UGC) of Bangladesh four areas of webometrics study: is the statutory apex body in the field of higher • Web page content analysis; education in Bangladesh. At present there are 54 private, 31 public and 3 international universities in • 7 8 Web link structure analysis (e.g. hyperlink, self operation across the country . Sobhan and Dey have link and external link); stated that in order to keep the universities in the race of higher education and scholarly communication, all • Web usage analysis (e.g. exploiting log files for the universities have to use ICT for their academic users searching and browsing behavior); and 308 ANN. LIB. INF. STU., DECEMBER 2011 • Web technology analysis (including search engine Since mid 1990s, there have been lots of efforts to performance) study the structure and characteristics of the web by itself. Several studies show that websites can be Web Impact Factor (WIF) is a part of the compared and ranked in different domains based on methodology in webometrics studies. The idea of 14 their impact factor. Ingwersen calculated the web measuring WIF as one of the quantitative indicators impact factor for some Danish domains and websites. (or the average link frequencies) was developed by The author used AltaVista for his study because it is Ingwersen14. WIF is a snapshot of a search engine believed that this search engine covers a broad area of database at a specific time. The higher the WIF, the the web and provides sufficient information for greater the perceived reputation of the website. The 19 webometrics studies. Jeyshankar and Babu , through idea of applying revised WIF techniques to the web a webometric study, examined the websites of 45 was proposed by Noruzi15. The WIF provides universities in Tamil Nadu. The study reflected that quantitative tools for ranking, evaluating, some universities in Tamil Nadu have higher number categorizing, and comparing websites, and top-level of web pages and some websites fall behind in their domains and sub-domains. Three types of links and simple, self link and external link web impact factor. WIF are formulated in the following way: 20 The simple WIF: The ratio of all links to the number Mukhopadhyay studied the WIF for university of pages websites in SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) countries as well as the sub The self link WIF: The ratio of selflinks within the domains of academic and research institutions in site to number of pages India. The author stated that because of the hierarchical structure of the web, WIF should be The external WIF: The ratio of links made from calculated at three levels and also believed that well- external sites to the target site, to the number of pages known search engines such as Alltheweb, AltaVista, at the site. and Hotbot can be used for data gathering and calculating WIF. In general, a web site with a higher impact factor may be considered to be more prestigious or of a higher In another study, two types of websites in Australia quality than those web sites with a lower impact had been compared: Australian universities websites factor. and Australian electronic journals. Analyzing the results of the study, the author concluded that the web Literature review impact factor is an appropriate indicator to measure the general impact of large institutions such as The science of webometrics and the study of links universities and research institutes, but it is not created between web pages try to determine a model reliable to evaluate websites with small content for scientific usage of the web and also information volume such as electronic journals21. resources with highest impact on the web using the new calculating methodologies to measure inlinks of Smith and Thelwall22 studied the web impact factor 16 the web pages . The concept of WIF was introduced for the Australian Universities websites. They used first in 1997 by a Spanish researcher, Rodriguez commercial search engines AltaVista and AllTheWeb 17 Gairín . The basic idea of this concept came from as well as a specially designed crawler for calculating journal impact factor (JIF) which was introduced by and comparing the web impact factor and the number Garfield in 1960s and used by the Institute of of links that three countries of Australia, New Zealand Scientific Information (ISI) to select the scientific and England were provided for the Australian 18 journals for citation indices ever since . WIF is an universities websites. indicator to measure and compare efficiency, attractiveness, and success of websites at a broad level The world universities are ranked based on their such as country domains or a limited level such as academic and research performance every year by academic websites. Absolute WIF or External WIF is some reputable centres such as the Institute of Higher the ratio of external inlinks to the web pages indexed Education and Shanghai Jiao Tong University (IHE- by search engines. SJTU). The results of these rankings, published ISLAM: WEBOMETRICS STUDY OF UNIVERSITIES IN BANGLADESH 309 annually as Academic Ranking of World Universities Table 1—Classification of university websites in Bangladesh (ARWU) have international importance23. by domain extensions Domain No. of universities Percentage Abrizah, Noorhidawati and Kiran24 highlighted the web performance of Asian institutional repositories .org 05 7.04 through global visibility and performance of Asian .edu.bd 27 38.02 top-ranked universities in the archiving and sharing .ac.bd 21 29.57 their research output through institutional repositories, .edu 13 18.30 based on the Ranking Web of World Repositories .net 03 4.22 (RWWR). .info 02 2.81 25 Islam and Alam analysed the websites of private Total 71 100 universities in Bangladesh according to the webometrics indicator. It examined and explored the 44 private university websites in Bangladesh and When undertaking WIF study, it is necessary to select identified the number of web pages and link pages, a suitable search engine that will count the number of pages in the web site and the number of pages linking and calculated the Overall Web Impact Factor (WIF) 21 and Absolute Web Impact Factor (WIF). In a cross- to the web site. Smith stated that the search engines sectional study, all the websites were analysed and should have a large database, covering as much as of compared using AltaVista search engine. The study the web as possible. AltaVista search engine has been used for the reasons as pointed out by Thelwall26, revealed that some private universities in Bangladesh 27 28 have higher number of web pages but their link pages Notess and Chu . The data collection method are very small in number, thus the websites fall extensively makes use of four special keywords and behind in their Overall WIF, self link, external links Boolean operators like domain, linkdomain, and Absolute WIF. While this study took into account linkdomain AND domain, and linkdomain AND NOT only 44 private universities, the present study is much domain.