Summary and Future Directions

Abstract

This book introduces a set of webometrics methods that should be widely useful in the social sciences and information science in particular. Blog searching can identify fluctuations in public interest in a topic as well as reveal the causes of these fluctuations. This can be supported by Google search volume data to check that any trends found are not peculiar to blogs. Link impact analysis can be used to indicate the impact of web sites or pages, and web impact assessment can be used to indicate the online impact of sets of documents or terms. In addition, hyperlink-based network diagrams can be used to identify patterns of interlinking between sets of web sites. All of these techniques are relatively simple to apply, and can be used as one of a number of methods to investigate a research problem or can be applied in a more in-depth manner as a separate research method. The techniques can also be applied to investigate online phenomena or the online reflections of offline phenomena. All of the methods have a number of limitations, however, that mean that their results should be interpreted carefully and cautiously in many cases.