Current Trends in Webometrics Research

Webometrics is the quantitative analysis of Web phenomena. The growth of Web technologies has opened new avenues for Web researchers for measurement and analyses of the phenomenon. Webometrics is traditionally used for quantifying Web data related to footprints of researchers or institutions on the Web measured in terms of their research publications and other parameters. The paper looks at the recent developments in webometrics research in light of emergence of social Web and big data, and their applications in new research fronts and future perspective of webometrics research. The paper also discusses about the recent developments in research techniques in webometrics such as query splitting and virtual memetics in the social network sites. It is observed that the growth of Web technologies has possibly posed new challenges for traditional citation databases which have been extensively used so far for measuring research impact of universities, institutions or individual researchers. The new trend has shown that impact measures are in the verge of acceptance as new method for measurement of academic and research contributions. One notable example for this is altmetrics. In the nutshell the paper gives an overview of the emerging trends and impact measuring techniques used in webometrics research.