Word co-occurrences on Webpages as a measure of the relatedness of organizations: A new Webometrics concept

Authors

L. Vaughan, Vaughan, L.; Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, N6A 5B7, Canada; email: lvaughan@uwo.caFollow
J. You

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2010

Volume

4

Journal

Journal of Informetrics

First Page

483

URL with Digital Object Identifier

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2010.04.005

Last Page

491

Abstract

Web hyperlink analysis has been a key topic of Webometric research. However, inlink data collection from commercial search engines has been limited to only one source in recent years, which is not a promising prospect for the future development of the field. We need to tap into other Web data sources and to develop new methods. Toward this end, we propose a new Webometrics concept that is based on words rather than inlinks on Webpages. We propose that word co-occurrences on Webpages can be a measure of the relatedness of organizations. Word co-occurrence data can be collected from both general search engines and blog search engines, which expands data sources greatly. The proposed concept is tested in a group of companies in the LTE and WiMax sectors of the telecommunications industry. Data on the co-occurrences of company names on Webpages were collected from Google and Google Blog. The co-occurrence matrices were analyzed using MDS. The resulting MDS maps were compared with industry reality and with the MDS maps from co-link analysis. Results show that Web co-word analysis could potentially be as useful as Web co-link analysis. Google Blog seems to be a better source than Google for co-word data collection. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.