Home Thelwall book review

College and Research Libraries
November 2005, Vol. 66, No. 6

Book Review

Thelwall, Mike. Link Analysis: An Information Science Approach. Amsterdam and Boston: Elsevier Academic, 2004. 269p. $69.95 (ISBN 0120885530).

Given the number of erudite individuals who use and contribute to the Web, it was just a matter of time before someone coined the phrase "I link, therefore I am" to describe the Web’s core characteristic—the ability to hyperlink ideas, texts, Web pages, or anything else that can be posted to a server. This Cartesian concept is central to the Web, as Web architect Tim Berners-Lee describes in Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor (San Francisco, 1999). When designing the Web’s linking, Berners-Lee wanted computers to emulate the human brain’s ability to follow random associations. He also found inspiration in the organizational tools of research—tables of contents, bibliographies, and indexes—that linked ideas together in a reasoned fashion.

Random association and careful organization: any attempt at link analysis must grapple with these seemingly disparate facets of linking. Fortunately, link analysis is really not that difficult to understand, as detailed in Mike Thelwall’s Link Analysis. In this well-organized book, Thelwall applies information science concepts and methodologies to explain link analysis. The result is a succinct work that focuses on academic Web use and scholarly communication aspects of linking.

The book is divided into five major sections. The first provides information on basic linking theory and an explanation on how Web crawlers and search engines function, followed by how these tools count links and how these counts can be interpreted. The second section discusses the Web as both an abstract graphic model and a collection of general and academic content sites. The third section deals specifically with academic aspects of the Web, examining the structure and linking patterns to and from university and departmental-level Web sites, as well as to academic journals and articles.

With the fourth section, the book moves from theory into descriptions of actual applications in practice, describing in detail five link analysis studies of academic networks, business Web sites, and personal Web pages. These case studies provide working models of methodologies and data analysis, complete with results and conclusions, and provide illustrative examples on which to hang the conceptual hat woven in the earlier sections.

"Tools and Techniques," the aptly titled fifth section, supplements Thelwall’s text with an accompanying Web site (http://linkanalysis.wlv.ac.uk/) and an associated link analysis software program, SocSciBot. This section includes directions on using commercial search engines, the Internet Archive, and other programs and applications for link analysis. Thelwall’s examples are clearly presented, and readers complete the section with a good sense of how to run their own link analysis.

Over the course of the text, readers will encounter some formulas and descriptions of algorithms, along with illustrative graphs and tables. Each chapter presents objectives and introduction, well-defined thesis, summary, and references. The supporting Web site provides more documentation.

Many parallels exist between citation analysis, bibliometrics, and link analysis. In his introduction, Thelwall notes that efforts to apply bibliometrics to Web link analysis date from 1996, when Ray Larson presented "Bibliometrics of the World Wide Web: An Exploratory Analysis of the Intellectual Structure of Cyberspace" at the annual American Society for Information Science and Technology meeting in Baltimore (http://sherlock.berkeley.edu/asis96/asis96.html). Since then Thelwall and others have contributed to this growing body of literature. Thelwall’s book is noteworthy in that he successfully presents theoretical perspectives, Web site mechanics, case studies, and hands-on exercises in a single, understandable narrative. The result is a text that not only explains the intellectual underpinnings of link analysis but also provides the tools and techniques for any librarian or researcher to engage in their own analyses.

Linking is a necessary and complex feature of the Web, and the Cartesian allusion above, despite its pithy nature, serves as a wonderfully succinct description of the Web’s basic nature. As scholarly communication becomes more Web based, link analysis is emerging as an important tool in understanding how the Web delivers information. Mike Thelwall’s book is an excellent resource for understanding—and using—this crucial tool.—Gene Hyde, Radford University.