Scholarly publishing on the web: Link analysis of the top 200 highly cited computer science articles on the WWW

This paper reports the results of a study that analyzes the link density of 200 highly cited documents appearing in ResearchIndex, an autonomous citation index of literature published on the Web. The focus of this analysis is the relationship between citations and hypertext links at the publicly available document level, Our analysis indicates no significant relationship between web-based citation counts and link density within this dataset. This would seem to indicate that link density is not analogous to citation counts among documents published on the Web. The study builds on previous work by Goodrum, McCain, Lawrence and Giles (2001) that examined the overlap between citation practice in computer science literature as it appears in SCISEARCH and as indexed on the Web using autonomous citation indexing.