Web Based Impact Measures for Institutional Repositories

Abstract

This study investigated webometric measures that could be used to evaluate the impact of institutional repositories, using Australasian university repositories as a case study. URL citation inlinks (occurrences of the repositories’ URL in the text of web pages), as found through Google searches, were counted. As well as links from the general web, links made from other Australasian academic institutions and from Wikipedia were counted. For repositories with significant deposit ratios, there appeared to be a small correlation between the URL citation inlinks from other Australasian academic institutions, and some conventional measures of research impact: the ISI citations/paper, the QS ranking score, and the ERA quality score. Repositories with higher deposit ratios appeared to achieve more inlinks from other Australasian academic institutions, indicating the value of repositories encouraging high deposit rates of their institutions research output. Institutions with repositories that had a high Wikipedia Web Impact Factor were not necessarily highly ranked in terms of inlinks from other tertiary institutions or ISI citations per paper. This indicates that repositories impact on the general web is different from their impact on the research community.