AoIR-ASIST

This paper describes the structure of academic hyperlinks embedded in universities’ websites hosted at Korea and examines the association between the structure of the hyperlink network and collaboration pattern among those universities based on their frequency of co-authored articles. Studying two networks, the academic hyperlink network and the co-authorship network, may be a necessary step to understand the dynamically changing process of actual communication created and sustained through both traditional and emerging communication media. Four groups identified by CONCOR analysis showed distinctive features. One group was composed of the members having the highest efficiency in terms of structural hole concept and they were receiving the highest in-links from other universities. Two other groups showed high number of out-links toward the first group. However, one group had relatively significant number of links to other members in the same group (within-group links), while the other group did not have such structure. An analysis confirmed that this hyperlink network pattern is correlated with authorship network, which shows that expanding one’s research identity via hyperlinks might be an indicator of productiveness of researchers and research institutes.