Evaluation of Webometric Scale Factors in Universities

Webometrics serves as the utmost information resource in modern era which has introduced new changes to the communication world and has been developed in order to be used in scientific contexts. Business engines are main tools for recognizing such information. In fact, web is a complex group of all types of information which is produced by different people and is searched by different users. From the mid-1990th, there have been lots of efforts in this area to investigate the Webometric identity and features based on info metric methods for its contents, connection structure and search engines. Universities’ webometric scale factors are similar to journals’ impact factors. Webometric features are responsible for counting the number of referrals to web pages. In fact, they have been defined to show universities’ and educational institutions’ obligation to advertise and spread the web. The aim of this paper is to evaluate webometric scale factors in universities of Tehran, Esfahan, TarbyatModares, Alzahra, Mazandaran, Guilan, Yazd, Araak and Razi. Study population includes all the members of department of selected universities. Employing a classified random sampling, the data was collected through the distribution of a questionnaire among the 355 persons of the academic staffs of selected universities. SPSS16.0 is used for statistical analysis. The results of research show that the situation of selected universities is unsuitable based on the factors of Webometric scale.