WISER Webometrics

Webometrics in information science is currently dominated by link analysis and strongly influenced by citation analysis because it is typically applied to scientific documents. The WISER project was an EU-funded consortium tasked with exploring the potential of the internet to yield a new generation of scientometric indicators. This talk describes some of the findings of this project and discusses the wider potential for link analysis research in scientometrics. The WISER consortium was lead by Andrea Scharnhorst and Paul Wouters, now of the Virtual Knowledge Studio (VKS - KNAW) in Amsterdam, and the other members were Isidro Aguillo’s team in Madrid (CINDOC), Hildrun Kretchmer, working from Amsterdam, and Sylvan Katz (SPRU) and Mike Thelwall and Viv Cothey (Wolverhampton) in the UK. The experience of the team included information science, sociology, science policy, indicator development and computer science. The list of publications below gives an idea of the wide range of findings produced by the consortium, and the following generic framework for link analysis in social sciences research, developed in the WISER project, illustrates one of the outcomes that others may find useful (Thelwall, 2004)