Why Is This Link Here? Identifying Academic Web Interlinking Motivations in Nigerian Universities

This paper investigates the university websites of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation. Its aim is to identify motivations why authors embed outbound hyperlinks on these websites. A classification scheme for academic web interlinking motivations was applied to over 5,000 hyperlinks pointing from the websites of 107 Nigerian universities. Classifying the motivations based on studying the source and target pages is a big challenge, especially due to the following three reasons: there could be many possible reasons available; guessing the true intentions of link creators could be a difficult task; multiple link creation motivations could exist. The pioneer application of Pearson’s chi-square test of independence offers a better picture of motivations. The chi-square test identifies the significant differences in interlinking motivations, which are peculiar to Nigerian universities of a particular category (federal, state and private universities). The study is a stepping stone toward further research on feasibility of findings in other developing countries. Results obtained from this research will be of great use for academic webpage developers and web authors, and will modify their work towards improving the use of hyperlinks as one of the major communication tools on the Web. TYPE OF PAPER AND