Developing Internet S&T Indicators for Science Policy and Decision-Making

Abstract(s)

A new procedure to obtain quantitative indicators of science and technology is presented. The indicators are derived from the presence of R&D institutions in the Internet. The explicit hypertext links (sitations =website citations) embedded in the institutions websites are considered as if they were traditional citations and treated in a similar way as ISI (Institute of Scientific Information) does with the bibliographic citations. Several indicators were obtained from a sample of 192 different websites representing the 76 Centres and Institutes with active presence in the World Wide Web out of a total of 109 that belong the Spanish National Council of Scientific Research (CSIC). Two combined methods were used to obtain the figures that describe quantitatively the websites: Agent mapping for extracting onsite values and search engines to evaluate external links. The indicators calculated were called density, an index of the relative number of links per site; endogamy designed to measure the relative weight of self-sitations and web impact factor, a visibility index taking into account the sitations received. The results show clearly that it is possible to obtain meaningful S&T Indicators from the presence in Internet of the R&D institutions. Some caution is recommended as larger samples are required to avoid “noise” and some important shortcomings of the current search engines.