This book provides a timely and welcome introduction to webometrics. Although the term webometrics was coined in 1997 by Tomas Almind and Peter Ingwersen and the similar term cybermetrics was popularised at the same time by Isidro Aguillo and his journal of the same name, the ideas behind them have reached a much wider audience through the altmetrics movement. Webometrics/cybermetrics started as specialisms within the information science field of informetrics and remained mainly of interest to a subset of informetricians for a long time. Although there were attempts to attract a wider social sciences audience to webometrics methods in order to investigate how issues are discussed and represented in the web, these met limited success. Moreover, webometric methods did not become part of the standard toolkit used for evaluating researchers and so were only used by a small but growing band of experts.
The most well-known webometric application is the Ranking Web of Universities (www.webometrics.info). This ranks universities mainly based on their web presences and has the goal to highlight and promote the open access publication of research and research-related information. One of the reasons for its popularity was probably that it is relatively straight forward for a university to increase their ranking by redesigning their website and by having a more pro-active open access policy, which must be a good thing.
The altmetrics movement, which began in about 2010, is concerned with gathering data about interest in individual academic articles from the social web. The rise of altmetrics has created interest in web-based metrics from two new audiences; scholarly publishers and scientists. The focus of altmetrics on data about individual articles can potentially help scientists to find important recent articles and if publishers provide altmetrics for articles in their digital libraries then this gives readers an additional incentive to visit their website. In contrast, webometrics did not primarily target publishers or individual scholars because, before the social web, webometric methods were difficult to automate and deploy on a large enough scale to be useful to publishers.
A side-effect of the interest in altmetrics is that increasingly many people are aware that metrics can be generated from the web for articles and are starting to wonder whether these methods could be used to help evaluate research. An example of this is the UK government Independent review of the role of metrics in research assessment. Ironically, evaluating research has been a more important goal for webometrics than for altmetrics but it seems inevitable that it will lead to renewed interest in webometric techniques, and particularly those that are a form of web citation analysis. This book provides an excellent start for the new audience for webometrics/cybermetrics by explaining some of the key techniques and applications. It should be particularly useful for students learning about the field as well as for research managers and scientometricians seeking to assess whether these techniques can help them in their roles.
Mike Thelwall
University of Wolverhampton
25 July 2014