Webometric Study on Iranian Universities of Medical Sciences

Numerous studies have been published on Webometrics regarding the influence of websites on each other and the reliability of Web Impact Factor (WIF) as a quantitive tool to show the visibility and impact of websites. The purpose of this survey is to study the impact of 40 universities covered by Iranian Ministry of Health on the Web. Accordingly, total number of web pages and links into each university were counted by advances search features of AltaVista search engine. The overall, inlink and self–link WIFs for each website were calculated. Finally the universities ranked according to these parameters. The results show that although Tehran University of Medical Sciences is first in the number of web pages. The overall results suggest that Iranian universities of medical sciences are not well known internationally due to their poor scholarly publications and focus on Persian language in their web pages