Abstract :
The quality and impact of academic Web sites is of
interest to many audiences, including the scholars who
use them and Web educators who need to identify best
practice. Several large-scale European Union research
projects have been funded to build new indicators for
online scientific activity, reflecting recognition of the
importance of the Web for scholarly communication. In
this paper we address the key question of whether
higher rated scholars produce higher impact Web sites,
using the United Kingdom as a case study and measuring
scholars’ quality in terms of university-wide average
research ratings. Methodological issues concerning the
measurement of the online impact are discussed, leading
to the adoption of counts of links to a university’s
constituent single domain Web sites from an aggregated
counting metric. The findings suggest that universities
with higher rated scholars produce significantly more
Web content but with a similar average online impact.
Higher rated scholars therefore attract more total links
from their peers, but only by being more prolific, refuting
earlier suggestions. It can be surmised that general Web
publications are very different from scholarly journal articles
and conference papers, for which scholarly quality
does associate with citation impact. This has important
implications for the construction of new Web indicators,
for example that online impact should not be used to
assess the quality of small groups of scholars, even
within a single discipline.
