Web visibility or wasted opportunity? Case studies from Mexican research institutes

Purpose – This paper aims to determine to what extent the scientific production and research activities of a group of National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) research institutes in the sciences, social sciences and humanities are visible on the internet with a view to identifying areas where web presence is not optimal so improvements can be made. Design/methodology/approach – The authors do this by analysing the relevant information on their web sites and by comparing institutional listings of scientific production between 2005 and 2006, with papers reported in the international, multidisciplinary online services of the Web of Science and Scopus , as well as in Clase and Periódica which cover production in Latin American journals. Findings – Results indicate general poor visibility of research activities and production in the institutional web sites with only limited access to full text articles. Web sites of the institutes in the sciences score better than those in the humanities and social sciences where book publication is an important research output. The official publication lists in the form of annual reports were found not to accurately represent production with additional papers attributed to the different institutions appearing in commercial databases. It is suggested that more effort should be directed towards improving the information content and access to research data on these institutional web sites, possibly through linkage to an UNAM repository. Originality/value – This is the first study to critically examine the visibility of research on Mexican academic web sites for which a series of indicators related to the different categories of research information which would ideally be found on institutional pages were developed.