A Webometrics Analysis of Iranian Journal of Medical Sciences

Websites of academic journals have an important role in communicating and providing services to researchers. The present study aimed to determine the number of incoming links of Iranian Journal of Medical Sciences websites. Besides، it aimed to determine the rate of visibility of core websites based on these findings. This descriptive study was performed using webometrics method in November 2011. We reviewed the site of Research and Technology Deputy of Ministry of Health in order to list the websites of Iranian Medical Sciences Journals. All the 199 websites of these journals searched by Google search engine and only 188 websites were found. Yahoo search engine was used to calculate the incoming links of these sites. Microsoft Excel 2010 was used to analyze the data. The findings proved that of 188 journals’ websites، only 29 journals were at the 1st level indexing. Furthermore، 68 journals were at the 2nd level، 73 journals were at the 3rd level and 18 journals had Iranian indexing. According to the type of website’s addresses، 75 journals had independent websites، 78 journals had sub-domain web addresses and 35 journals had web pages of the main websites. The results of this study represented that those journals at the 1st level indexing gained the highest share of core websites and the other journals at the 2nd and 3rd levels indexing gained second and third ranks، respectively. The highest share of core websites belonged to the independent websites and journals’ website with sub-domain web addresses obtained the next rank positions. Journals with web pages of a main website were not among the core websites.