New Frontier of Informetric and Webometric Research: Mining Web Usage Data

Many Webometric research have been conducted since the early days of the Web. Most have focused on Web hyperlink as data source. Very few used Web usage data, a very rich data source that can be analyzed for various purposes. The objective of this paper is to encourage more research into this new frontier and to advance informetric and Webometric research with new Web data sources. I will first introduce the concept of Web data mining and discuss how Web data mining relates to traditional informetric research. I will then discuss types of Web usage data that are available and provide examples of studies that used these types of data. I will also discuss the limitations of Web usage data.