Linking patterns in European Union countries: geographical maps of the European academic web space

Abstract

This national level study intends to describe the existing relationships between the number of web pages, inlinks to and outlinks from Europe and national or internal links in the European Higher Education Area through a sample of 535 European universities' web domains. Several geographical maps are introduced to summarize and visualize this statistical information. The main result shows that larger countries, in number of web pages, link less to the remaining European countries, while the smaller ones are characterized by their link profusion to the European zone. The great presence of national links in large and medium size countries confirms that the European academic web space is shaped by the aggregation of national sub-networks, while the similar low presence in small countries suggests that these are linked to another large country.