Informetric analyses on the world wide web: Methodological approaches to 'webometrics'

This article introduces the application of informetric methods to the World Wide Web (www), also called Webometrics. A case study presents a workable method for general informetric analyses of the www. In detail, the paper describes a number of specific informetric analysis parameters. As a case study the Danish proportion of the WWW is compared to those of other Nordic countries. The methodological approach is comparable with common bibliometric analyses of the ISI citation databases. Among other results the analyses demonstrate that Denmark would seem to fall seriously behind the other Nordic countries with respect to visibility on the Net and compared to its position in scientific databases.