Web Impact Audit - Oxford Internet Institute

This report presents a Web Impact audit based upon a comparison of the links to The Oxford Internet Institute and a set of similar web sites. The set of similar sites are those in the table and figure below. A comparison of links to sites is designed to reveal sites that are the most well-known on the web. In an academic context, sites with many links tend to be associated with more and higher quality research, although there are many exceptions to this rule.

Data from search engine: Yahoo! via its Applications Programming Interface
Data gathered on: 5 May 2007.

Executive Summary

The Oxford Internet Institute has over ten times the web impact of a range of research units and departments in the UK Media and Communication research area. At an international level, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School has two and a half times more impact, although this is partly due to the longer time that the Berkman Center has been active.

Certification

The Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group at the University of Wolverhampton certifies that:

Results reported in this paper were obtained by using state of the art webometric techniques and have been analysed in a way that has been chosen for reliability and not to advantage any particular site.
No sites considered for the analyses have been left out or deliberately ignored to present more favourable results.
The site column in the overview table, subject to the disclaimers below, are certified as a reasonable and not deliberately biased assessment of the relative impact of the collection of web sites reported.

Figure showing the main findings: a comparison of the number of links to the OII web site with a range of other sites.

Table listing the URLs of pages from other web sites that contain a link to each web site in the list (site inlinks), as returned by Yahoo! via its API on 5 May 2007. In addition, it contains the number of domains, sites, STLDs and TLDs containing one or more link to the site, as derived from the URL list. The site column is the best indicator of web impact: the number of sites linking to each given site.

Name	Home page URL used	URLs	Domains	Sites	STLDs	TLDs
Film & Television Studies, University of East Anglia	http://www.uea.ac.uk/eas/sectors/film/fshome.shtml	20	17	17	9	7
School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies - University of East London	http://www.uel.ac.uk/ssmcs/	39	35	34	14	12
Centre for Cultural Studies (CCS), Goldsmiths	http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/cultural-studies/	53	45	42	19	18
Centre for Cultural Policy Studies, University of Warwick	http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/theatre_s/cp/	31	25	25	17	14
The Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI), University of Westminster	http://www.wmin.ac.uk/mad/page-561	14	12	12	8	7
Department of Film & Media Studies, University of Stirling	http://www-fms.stir.ac.uk/	54	48	47	19	16
Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies	http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomec/	84	70	64	23	20
UCL Department of Political Science - School of Public Policy	http://www.ucl.ac.uk/spp/	74	54	53	16	14
Media@LSE	http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/	104	79	74	19	17
The Oxford Internet Institute	http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/	1716	914	802	72	55
Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School	http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/	5248	2508	2162	132	73

Definitions of terms. Note that the Sites column is the most reliable.

URLs - the number of URLs returned by the search engine (NOT the estimated number of URLs it reports) - see FAQ for >1,000 results
Domains/Sites/STLD/TLD - see FAQ for these and not that they are all derived from the URL list used to generate the URL count

Disclaimers

The figures reported should only be used for comparisons and do not represent complete results because it is impossible to obtain complete results.
Although no sites have been deliberately left out of the analysis, the set of web sites may not necessarily be a complete set of sites in any sense, and the pages chosen may not be the best home pages.
Although reasonable attempts have been made to eliminate spam from the results, it is possible that spam may influence the figures.
The link measures use disadvantage newer sites because it takes a while for a web site to attract links from other sites, even if its owning organisation has high impact. They also disadvantage smaller organisations because larger organisations tend to naturally attract more links.

Results from base query: link:http://www.uea.ac.uk/eas/sectors/film/fshome.shtml -site:uea.ac.uk

Results from base query: link:http://www.uel.ac.uk/ssmcs/ -site:uel.ac.uk

Results from base query: link:http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/cultural-studies/ -site:goldsmiths.ac.uk

Results from base query: link:http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/theatre_s/cp/ -site:warwick.ac.uk

Results from base query: link:http://www.wmin.ac.uk/mad/page-561 -site:wmin.ac.uk

Results from base query: link:http://www-fms.stir.ac.uk/ -site:stir.ac.uk

Results from base query: link:http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomec/ -site:cardiff.ac.uk

Results from base query: link:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/spp/ -site:ucl.ac.uk

Results from base query: link:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/ -site:lse.ac.uk

Results from base query: link:http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/ -site:ox.ac.uk

Results from base query: link:http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/ -site:harvard.edu