The Web as an information source on informetrics? A content analysis

This article addresses the question of whether the Web can serve as an info rmation source for research. Specifically, it analyzes by way of content an alysis the Web pages retrieved by the major search engines on a particular date (June 7, 1998), as a result of the query "informetrics OR informetric. " In 807 out of the 942 retrieved pages, the search terms were mentioned in the context of information science. Over 70% of the pages contained only i ndirect information on the topic, in the form of hypertext links and biblio graphical references without annotation. The bibliographical references ext racted from the Web pages were analyzed, and lists of most productive autho rs, most cited authors, works, and sources were compiled. The list of refer ences obtained from the Web was also compared to data retrieved from commer cial databases. For most cases, the list of references extracted from the W eb outperformed the commercial, bibliographic databases. The results of the se comparisons indicate that valuable, freely available data is hidden in t he Web waiting to be extracted from the millions of Web pages.