The relationship between the WIFs or inlinks of Computer Science Departments in UK and their RAE ratings or research productivities in 2001

Previous research has shown that Weblink based metrics can correlate with traditional research assessment at the university level. In this study, we test whether the same is true for the computer science departments in the UK. The relevant Web Impact Factors (WIFs) were calculated from the link data collected both from Alta Vista and the special academic crawler of the University of Wolverhampton.The numbers of staff members and Web pages in each computer science department were used as denominators for the WIFs calculation. The number of inlinks to the computer science departments correlated significantly with their research productivities, and WIFs with numbers of staff members as denominators correlated significantly with their Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) ratings.The number of staff members was confirmed to be a better indicator of departmental size than the number of Web pages within the department's domain.