Dear all:
Thanks for your interest in the Ranking of repositories, part of our larger
effort for rnaking webpresence of universities and research centers. A few
comments to your messages:
- Currently the Ranking of repositories is a beta version. We will thank
comments, suggestions and criticisms. Information about missed repositories
are warmly welcomed. After feedback recieved during the last days we are
considering a new edition before the scheduled one in July.
- Our rank formula mimic in part PageRank but our "inspiration" was in fact
impact factor. We maintain a ratio 1:1 between visibility (impact) and size
(activity) that it is the basis of IF. In order to take into account the
diversity of web info we decide to split the size contribution according to
additional criteria.
- Freshness is a topic we are concerned about not only for repositories but
for the rest of the rankings too. We are considering to take it into account
in the Scholar contribution giving more weight to recent publications.
- There are methodological problems for producing relative indicators:
percentage of global output, or institution size normalization. But you know
ranking are usually build by GDP (US, Japan, Germany,...) and not GDP per
capita (Luxembourg, United Arab Emirates, ...)
- Our position as a research group has been previously stated but I am going
to summarise again: The rankings are made with the aim of increase the
volume of academic information available on the Web, promoting the
electronic publication of all the activities of the universities, not only
the research related ones. And specially from developing countries
institutions.
Best regards,
Leslie Carr escribió:
>
> On 9 Feb 2008, at 21:36, Arthur Sale wrote:
>
> > It looks as though the algorithm is the same as for university websites.
> >
> > Rank each repository for inward bound hyperlinks (VISIBILITY)
> > Rank every repository for number of pages (SIZE)
> > Rank every repository for number of 'interesting' documents eg .doc.
> > .pdf (RICH FILES)
> > Rank every repository for number of records returned by a Google Scholar
> > search (GOOGLE SCHOLAR)
> > Compute (VISIBILITY x 50%) + (SIZE x 20%) + (RICH FILES x 15%) + (GOOGLE
> > SCHOLAR x 15%)
> > And then rank the repositories on this score.
> >
> > This is a poor measure in general. VISIBILITY (accounts for 50% of
> > score!) is not necessarily useful for repositories, when harvesting in
> > more important than hyperlinks. It will be strongly influenced by staff
> > members linking their publications off a repository search. Both SIZE
> > and RICH FILES measure absolute size and say nothing about currency or
> > activity. Some of the higher placed Australian universities have simply
> > had old stuff dumped in them, and are relatively inactive in acquiring
> > current material. Activity should be a major factor in metrics for
> > repositories, and this could easily measured by a search limited to a
> > year (eg 2007), or by the way ROAR does it through OAI-PMH harvesting.
> >
> I believe that the Webometrics (ghastly name!) ranking of repositories
> uses the same criteria as its ranking of universities ie it is attempting
> to quantify the impact that the repository has had. This is very different
> to the size, deposit activity, or even used-ness of the repository and
> explains why the major contributing factor is VISIBILITY. The main issue
> for this league table is "how much evidence is there in the public web
> that your active research and scholarly outputs are valued enough by your
> community of peers that they are linking to them".
> This will probably seem entirely arbitrary to some people, and entirely
> obvious to others, depending on how much they see "the web" as a
> para-literature. It mimics Google's PageRank valuation of web pages
> according to how many 'votes' (links/quasi-citations) they get from other
> pages from independent sources.
>
> It is not possible to tell with any accuracy whether a University Website
> is "a good website" simply by looking at the University's place in the
> Webometrics Ranking of Universities. The website is simply a channel which
> delivers visibility-impact for the University (or not). Similarly for the
> repository. --
> Les Carr
>
--
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Isidro F. Aguillo
Laboratorio de Cibermetría
Cybermetrics Lab
CCHS - CSIC
Joaquin Costa, 22
28002 Madrid. Spain
isidro _at_ cindoc.csic.es
+34-91-5635482 ext 313
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Received on Mon Feb 11 2008 - 10:48:59 GMT