Successful researchers publicizing research online : An outlink analysis of European highly cited scientists' personal websites

Purpose – This study aims to explore the link creating behaviour of European highly cited scientists based upon their online lists of publications and their institutional personal websites. Design/methodology/approach – A total of 1,525 highly cited scientists working at European institutions were first identified. Outlinks from their online lists of publications and their personal websites pointing to a pre-defined collection of popular academic websites and file types were then gathered by a personal web crawler. Findings – Perhaps surprisingly, a larger proportion of social scientists provided at least one outlink compared to the other disciplines investigated. By far the most linked-to file type was PDF and the most linked-to type of target website was scholarly databases, especially the Digital Object Identifier website. Health science and life science researchers mainly linked to scholarly databases, while scientists from engineering, hard sciences and social sciences linked to a wider range of target websites. Both book sites and social network sites were rarely linked to, especially the former. Hence, whilst successful researchers frequently use the Web to point to online copies of their articles, there are major disciplinary and other differences in how they do this. Originality/value – This is the first study to analyse the outlinking patterns of highly cited researchers' institutional web presences in order to identify which web resources they use to provide access to their publications.