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Links to commercial websites as a source of business information

Author

Listed:
  • Liwen Vaughan

    (University of Western Ontario)

  • Guozhu Wu

    (Shanghai Library/ISTIS)

Abstract

Websites of China's top 100 information technology (IT) companies were examined. Link count to a company's website was found to correlate with the company's revenue, profit, and research and development expenses. This suggests that Web hyperlinks to commercial sites can be a business performance indicator and thus a source of business information. This information is useful for Web business intelligence and Web data mining. As a comparison to IT companies, China's top 100 privately owned companies were also studied. No relationship between link count and the business performance measure was found for these companies due probably to the heterogeneous nature of this group. Data collection issues for webometrics research were also explored in the study.

Suggested Citation

  • Liwen Vaughan & Guozhu Wu, 2004. "Links to commercial websites as a source of business information," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 60(3), pages 487-496, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:60:y:2004:i:3:d:10.1023_b:scie.0000034389.14825.bc
    DOI: 10.1023/B:SCIE.0000034389.14825.bc
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Madnick, Stuart & Siegel, Michael, 2002. "Seizing the Opportunity: Exploiting Web Aggregation," Working papers 4351-01, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Sloan School of Management.
    2. Liwen Vaughan & Mike Thelwall, 2003. "Scholarly use of the Web: What are the key inducers of links to journal Web sites?," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 54(1), pages 29-38, January.
    3. Mike Thelwall, 2001. "Extracting macroscopic information from Web links," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 52(13), pages 1157-1168.
    4. Alastair Smith & Mike Thelwall, 2002. "Web Impact Factors for Australasian universities," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 54(3), pages 363-380, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

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    Cited by:

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    2. Abbasiharofteh, Milad & Kinne, Jan & Krüger, Miriam, 2021. "The strength of weak and strong ties in bridging geographic and cognitive distances," ZEW Discussion Papers 21-049, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    3. Erjia Yan & Qinghua Zhu, 2008. "Hyperlink analysis for government websites of Chinese provincial capitals," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 76(2), pages 315-326, August.
    4. Lola García-Santiago & Felix Moya-Anegón, 2009. "Using co-outlinks to mine heterogeneous networks," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 79(3), pages 681-702, June.
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    8. Tranos, Emmanouil & Incera, Andre Carrascal & Willis, George, 2022. "Using the web to predict regional trade flows: data extraction, modelling, and validation," OSF Preprints 9bu5z, Center for Open Science.
    9. Liwen Vaughan, 2016. "Uncovering information from social media hyperlinks: An investigation of twitter," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 67(5), pages 1105-1120, May.
    10. José-Antonio Ontalba-Ruipérez & Enrique Orduna-Malea & Adolfo Alonso-Arroyo, 2016. "Identifying institutional relationships in a geographically distributed public health system using interlinking and co-authorship methods," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 106(3), pages 1167-1191, March.
    11. Heiko Thimm & Karsten Boye Rasmussen & Wolfgang Gohout, 2016. "Website quality and performance indicators including ratio numbers – A study of German and Danish SME companies," Journal of Business, LAR Center Press, vol. 1(3), pages 22-36, July.
    12. Bar-Ilan, Judit, 2008. "Informetrics at the beginning of the 21st century—A review," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 2(1), pages 1-52.
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    14. István Szûts & Gábor László, 2006. "Exploring the World Wide Web," Proceedings-4th International Conference on Management, Enterprise and Benchmarking (MEB 2006),, Óbuda University, Keleti Faculty of Business and Management.

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