Abstract
The paper reports the application of classical bibliometric methods to evaluate the impact of scientific, political, and business developments. The novel aspect is to regard the Web as a citation network where the traditional information entities (scientific articles and the citations given to and taken from them) are replaced by webpages with external and internal links. The methodological studies are intended to test the usability of large international citation databases and the World Wide Web as feasible and reliable tools in quantitative analyses for gathering useful information for business intelligence. Formerly, the impact of authors and their scientific production was measured by the average citation frequencies of journals publishing their research: the Journal Impact Factor (JIF), calculated by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in the United States and published annually in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR)—the most frequently used quantitative indicator to measure the quality/value/impact of research works published in the core international journals. It has been suggested that, by calculating the number of webpages pointing to a given site, analogously, a Web Impact Factor can be calculated as a way of comparing the attractiveness of sites or domains on the World Wide Web. A key to webometric studies has been the use of large-scale Web search engines such as Alta Vista that allow measurements to be made of the total number of pages in a Web space and links to those Web spaces. These search engines provide similar possibilities for the investigation of links between documents to those provided by the citation databases created by ISI. To illustrate the scope and nature of informetric research methods applied in competitive intelligence analysis, a short presentation is given of samples of research studies carried out at the Centre for Informetic Studies in Copenhagen (CIS). © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published Version
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