Web issue analysis: An integrated water resource management case study

In this article Web issue analysis is introduced as a new technique to investigate an issue as reflected on the Web. The issue chosen, integrated water resource management (IWRM), is a United Nations–initiated paradigm for managing water resources in an international context, particularly in develop...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 2006-08, Vol.57 (10), p.1303-1314
Main Authors: Thelwall, Mike, Vann, Katie, Fairclough, Ruth
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Bibliometrics. Scientometrics
Bibliometrics. Scientometrics. Evaluation
Computer applications
Developing countries
Document markup languages
Economic development
Evaluation
Exact sciences and technology
Hypertext
HyperText Markup Language
Information and communication sciences
Information science. Documentation
Internet
LDCs
Library and information science. General aspects
Management
Noun phrases
Nouns
Performance measures
Portable document format
Production methods
Resource management
Sciences and techniques of general use
URLs
Water
Water resources
Water resources management
Webs
Websites
World Wide Web
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Summary:In this article Web issue analysis is introduced as a new technique to investigate an issue as reflected on the Web. The issue chosen, integrated water resource management (IWRM), is a United Nations–initiated paradigm for managing water resources in an international context, particularly in developing nations. As with many international governmental initiatives, there is a considerable body of online information about it: 41,381 hypertext markup language (HTML) pages and 28,735 PDF documents mentioning the issue were downloaded. A page uniform resource locator (URL) and link analysis revealed the international and sectoral spread of IWRM. A noun and noun phrase occurrence analysis was used to identify the issues most commonly discussed, revealing some unexpected topics such as private sector and economic growth. Although the complexity of the methods required to produce meaningful statistics from the data is disadvantageous to easy interpretation, it was still possible to produce data that could be subject to a reasonably intuitive interpretation. Hence Web issue analysis is claimed to be a useful new technique for information science.
ISSN:1532-2882
2330-1635
1532-2890
2330-1643
DOI:10.1002/asi.20434