Linking patterns in European Union countries: geographical maps of the European academic web space

José Luis Ortega, Isidro F. Aguillo
2008 Journal of information science  
This national-level study intends to describe the existing relationships between the number of web pages, inlinks to and outlinks from Europe and national or internal links in the European Higher Education Area through a sample of 535 European universities web domains. Several geographical maps are introduced to summarize and visualize this statistical information. The main result shows that larger countries, in number of web pages, link less to the remaining European countries, while the
more » ... r ones are characterized by their link profusion to the European zone. The great presence of national links in large and medium size countries confirms that the European academic web space is shaped by the aggregation of national sub-networks, while the similar low presence in small countries suggests that these are linked to another large country. low web page count in the French academic web space, using AltaVista. They attribute this 'shortfall' to the large number of web sites, although they cover a relatively small number of web pages. Geographical maps have shown strong relationships between countries based on cultural and geographical aspects. Several works have detected similar relationships in academic web spaces as European Union [15] or Australasia [27] . So we can consider that the link relationships at the level of countries are determined by geographical and cultural factors, while the link relationships among web domains or sites are more specialized and thematic-oriented [17, 28] .
doi:10.1177/0165551507086990 fatcat:hzp5jxisczgx5cfmvxtrb4gypu