Brazilian Journal of Information Science (Dec 2007)
APPLICATION OF WEB INDICATORS TO THE LATIN-AMERICAN ACADEMIC SITES IN SOCIAL SCIENCES
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to do a webometric analysis of academic sites of Latin-American Social Sciences applying three indicators: visibility, luminosity and network density. In order to undertake this analysis, we have used webmining, a method based on the use of tools that help in obtaining information from the Web. The search engine Alta Vista was employed to measure the visibility of websites. The mapping software Link Xenu Steuth was employed to calculate luminosity. Excel, Ucinet5 and NetDraw were employed to determine network density (they allowed us to estimate links, build up matrix and visualize connections among national and international networks). The results obtained in this research showed that within the 174 analyzed websites those which appear first in the ranking (the most linked or cited) are Brazilian, those which appear at the top in terms of luminosity (the ones that point or cite the most) are Mexican, and the country that appears to have the highest network density is Peru. Finally, we found out that the website with the highest number of links to websites from other countries is Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales of Mexico (FLACSO-MX).
