Communication Studies, Department of
Date of this Version
2011
Abstract
Interest in quantifying the the amount of traffic directed to specific websites grew soon after the rise of the internet in the early-to-mid 1990s. Drawing from scholarly metrics such as citation analysis, Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a ranking system for the internet that would apply numerical value to a website based on the number of hyperlinks contained within, and linked to, that same website. This measurement tool opened the door for academic scholars to learn more about how their work circulates online. However, personal websites are not the only way that scholars have been able to make public their work on the open web. Corresponding with the rise of internet, institutional repositories have begun to slowly grow in popularity. The first ever online repository arXiv was launched in 1991 and is associated with the Los Alamos National Laboratories.1 The success of arXiv, has resulted in the launch of many other institutional and subject-based repositories around the world (see Table 1).
Comments
Published in Measuring Scholarly Metrics, edited by Gordon R. Mitchell (Lincoln, NE: Oldfather Press, 2011). Copyright © 2011 Adam Knowlton. Distributed under Creative Commons license.