ART: SLoan,Citation analysis in a Web-based world

[Mark Newman]

> Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2000 10:47:47 -0600
> From: "Sloan, Bernie" <bernies at UILLINOIS.EDU>
>
> ...how do you judge the
> relative importance of a citation from a Web resource, rather than a
> citation from a journal article? If your paper is cited in a journal article
> (especially a refereed journal), that's one thing. But since the quality of
> Web-based resources varies so much, do these somehow count for "less"?
>
> Bernie Sloan
> Senior Library Information Systems Consultant
> University of Illinois Office for Planning and Budgeting


It is interesting to note that almost exactly the same mechanisms
that are used to evaluate the importance of journal citations can
be used to evaluate the standing of web-sites - fundamentally both
citations and the web are directed graphs, and the mathematics of
how we analyse them is almost identical.

A nice recent review which highlights the analogies between
evaluation of web-sites and of publications is Jon Kleinberg,
"Hubs, authorities, and communities" in ACM Computing Surveys 31(4),
December 1999.

Mark.

--
Prof. M. E. J. Newman
Santa Fe Institute
Santa Fe, New Mexico