UK academic web links and collaboration - an exploratory study

Universities work in collaboration with many other organizations, and these collaborations have important consequences for the national economy. The ability to measure these collaborations in a quick, timely fashion in comparison with similar organizations would enable institutions to improve collaborative efforts. This article investigates the potential of web links to act as an indicator of collaboration through a detailed classification of 2600 links from universities to government, commercial and other domains. Whilst there are significant differences in the proportion of web links that reflect collaboration, depending on the source page owner and the target page top-level domain, the majority of web links on a university web page do not reflect a collaboration between the web page owner and the target web page owner. However, there are still a significant number of links reflecting collaborative relationships which can provide a rich source of information. A potential future area of investigation is into the number of links between web sites.