Calculating Web impact factor for university websites of Pakistan

• Published in: Electronic library Vol. 33; no. 5; pp. 883 - 895
• Main Authors: Khan, Arif, Idrees, Haroon
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Emerald Group Publishing Limited 01.01.2015
• Subjects: Bibliometrics; Developing countries; Higher education; Impact factors; Information & communications technology; Information & knowledge management; Information Science Education; Institutional repositories; Internet; LDCs; Libraries; Library and information science; Literature Reviews; Mathematical analysis; Pakistan; Periodicals; Printing; Ranking; Ratings and rankings; Researchers; Scholarly Web sites; Search engines; Searching; Studies; Teaching Methods; Universities; Web sites; Webometrics; Websites; Pakistan; Web sites; Universities
• ISSN: 0264-0473; 1758-616X
• DOI: 10.1108/EL-01-2014-0022

Purpose – This study aims to explore the Web impact factors (WIFs) for websites of Pakistani universities. The paper discusses why revised Web impact factor (RWIF) is more meaningful than simple WIF. The study also attempts to rank the top-five websites of Pakistani universities by considering four different website ranking systems and compares the WIFs of university websites of other developing countries as well. Design/methodology/approach – This study calculates the RWIF for subject websites using two webometric tools. Open Site Explorer service (i.e. Developer Shed) and two commercial search engines, i.e. Google and Bing, were used to collect the data for examining the RWIF for subject websites. Findings – Collectively 41,960 web pages and 49,740 inlinks were found in top-ten Pakistani universities’ websites. The collective RWIF for subject websites comes to 1.185, which is at the top in comparison with other developing countries, i.e. India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Originality/value – Calculating WIF for university websites in Pakistan and presenting the comparison with other types of website ranking system is a kind of first study conducted for Pakistani library websites. The study also presents alternate search strategy for data collection to calculate RWIF for websites.