Webometric analysis of departments of librarianship and information science

It is concluded that sitation data are not well suited to the quantitative evaluation of the research status of LIS departments and that departments can best boost their web visibility by hosting as wide a range of types of material as possible.

Abstract

This paper describes a webometric analysis of the linkages (or ‘sitations’) to websites associated with departments of librarianship and information science (LIS). Some of the observed sitation counts appear counter-intuitive and there is only a very limited correlation with peer evaluations of research performance, with many of the sitations being from pages that are far removed in subject matter from LIS. Our conclusions are that sitation data are not well suited to the quantitative evaluation of the research status of LIS departments and that departments can best boost their web visibility by hosting as wide a range of types of material as possible.