Abstract:
The purpose of this study is to analyse the correlation between content and traffic of
21,485 academic websites (universities and research institutes). The achieved result is
used as an indicator which shows the performance of the websites for attracting more
visitors. This inspires a best practice for developing new websites or promoting the traffic
of the existing websites. At the first step, content of the site is divided into three major
items which are: Size, Papers and Rich Files. Then, the Spearman correlation between
traffic of the websites and these items are calculated for each country and for the world,
respectively. At the next step, countries are ranked based on their correlations, also a new
indicator is proposed from combining these three correlations of the countries. Results
show that in most countries, correlation between traffic of the websites and Papers is less
than correlations between traffic of the websites and Rich Files and Size.
Machine summary:
ir Abstract The purpose of this study is to analyse the correlation between content and traffic of 21,485 academic websites (universities and research institutes).
To our best knowledge, the correlation between the traffic of the websites and their major partitions which are: Size, Papers and Rich Files have not yet been the focus of considerable study.
Comparing the correlations between traffic of a site and items such as: number of the papers (Papers), number of the content files (provided in pdf, doc and ppt formats referred to as Rich Files) and the total number of files and pages included in the site (Size) can give useful information regarding visitors' behavior and their interests.
Alexa is reliable for collecting traffic data (Vaughan & Yang, 2013) which provides rankings of the websites based on number of the visitors and hits.
-What are the rankings of countries based on correlation between academic contents and traffic of the websites?
Data of the world in table (4) shows that correlation between traffic of the websites and the size of the websites and rich files are equal to 0.
Table 4 Shows the correlation between the traffic of the websites and the Size,Rich file and papers in the top 40 countries with hi ghest number of the active universities.
Performance of the academic websites for providing data and attracting more visitors in the web pages and Rich Files are greater than performance of the papers in the websites.