Hanan Nouruzinia; Mohammad Reza Farhadpoor
Abstract
Background and Objectives: Academic websites by introducing history, goals, educational, research, administrative and extracurricular services, and the recruitment of students, faculty and staff, play an important role in the dissemination of educational, research and administrative information of universities. ...
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Background and Objectives: Academic websites by introducing history, goals, educational, research, administrative and extracurricular services, and the recruitment of students, faculty and staff, play an important role in the dissemination of educational, research and administrative information of universities. The web is a vast collection of heterogeneous information that are interconnected through links. the information on the web is not organized properly, and this heterogeneous nature of information imposed disordered conditions on the web. However, the organization may provide a large amount of information on its website, but if retrieval of it is difficult, its usefulness will be reduced. Furthermore, a website may have a high level of interaction, but if users can not have access to it, this level of interaction will not be significant. This indicates a key problem in that website’s visibility and accessibility. Visibility is a very important metric in Webometrics studies, so that the usefulness of the inventories depends on how its content is visible, and the numbers in the inventory is a good indicator for measuring visibility. The visibility of a site also affects its coverage and retrieval by search engines. Accordingly, visibility and clarity are related to enabling interconnections in a space that todays have found a great importance. The topic of web visibility and its important role in different rankings of universities and higher education institutions has been the subject of several models in this field. With regard to the comprehensiveness of the Fishkin & Pollard’s (2007) industry model, this study intends to examine the characteristics of the top 100 web sites in webometric ranking system. So the main question is, what is the status of the site size, the rich files, and the number of articles, the site links, and the visibility of the top 100 Web sites in Webometric ranking system? And is the size of the website, the number of information rich files, the number of articles retrieved from Google Scholar and Web Links affect their visibility? Methodology: : The present study is an applied research in terms of its objective, and since it seeks to describe the status of the university's superior university webometric system in terms of visibility characteristics, it has been conducted as an analytical survey. Data collection was done by library and field methods in the first six months of year 2017. For this data collection, the checklists according to Fishkin and Pollard’s (2007) model, containing 30 items for the four subsets of visibility, size of website (including the number of web pages, website size in megabytes, and page rank), rich information files (including PDF, DOC, PPT, PS and RTF) and the number of articles retrieved through Google Scholar, was used. The validity of the instrument was formally determined and its reliability was calculated by using the retest method, and the correlation of the results was obtained (r = 0.89), which it confirms the reliability of the instrument and then various instruments were used to evaluate each of them. Data analysis was done using the SPSS 21software. Findings: The results showed that 14 features of the industry model were observed in 100% of the websites. The size of the website is more than 89% between 0.59to 7.39 MB. The results of the hypothesis test showed that the size and volume of the site (r = 0.637) at the significance level (Sig. 0.002), the number of enriched files (r = 0.546) at the significance level (Sig. 0.001), receiving referral links (r = 0. 674) at the significant level (Sig. 0.000), and the number of articles retrieved from Google Scholar (r = 0.654) at the significance level (Sig. 0.001) has a direct impact on visibility. In addition, the intensity of the relationship is stronger for the variable of referred links compared to the other three variables. Discussion: The visibility of a website is an important and essential component because it represents accessibility and find ability of a web site by the various search engines in the heterogeneous web environment. The effect of different components on visibility can be investigated from various aspects. For example, receiving referred links on the one hand points to sharing of a website content with other websites, which itself can be the reason for the validity of information content of a site; on the other hand, the visibility of a website and the ability to retrieve it by search engines refers indirectly to links from other sites. The multiplicity of links within the website and from the subpages and subset of a website can also indicate the distribution of the information content of the website on its various pages. This also refers to the architecture of the website and is associated to the size of the website and the number of pages. Therefore, identifying different factors requires further studies in the future.
