Measuring web connectivity between research organizations through ROR identifiers
Creators: name: Orduña-Malea, Enrique
name: Bautista-Puig, Núria
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2022

description: The results obtained in this exploratory work evidence that the percentage of ROR identifiers linked is limited (51.6% of ROR identifiers have been linked at least once). These links come from a limited number of referring domains (242 unique domain names), and mainly from bibliographic records (51.4% of links) and organization cards (36% of links). While the distribution of ROR identifiers is biased towards Anglo-Saxon countries (mainly United States) and type (companies), the educational research organizations are the institutions most linked through their corresponding ROR-based URLs. This study has covered the number of links towards ROR identifiers considering the whole internet. This approach has allowed to obtain a general overview of the implementation of ROR across the entire online academic ecosystem. Future studies should measure the degree of implementation of ROR IDs on specific bibliographic databases (e.g. DOAJ, Sherpa, Crossref). At the time of writing this work, this implementation is still limited. For example, Crossref has provided coverage data information showing a limited integration of ROR in Crossref Metadata, as of January 2022 (3,790 records include a ROR IDs, covering 205 different ROR IDs). The coverage is expected to increase in the following years. However, the following limitations should be acknowledged. First, the dynamism of the Web causes the existence of deleted links or removed websites. This makes links counts instable and non-cumulative and must always be interpreted as a still picture at the time of data collection. Second, link data depend on the link source. In this case, data have been obtained from Majestic, a professional link intelligent tool. Results should be restricted to the coverage of this source, as other link sources might provide different results. Third, the use of ROR identifiers can be underrepresented, as they can be inserted without links (e.g., ROR 04q93ds34). Fourth, links counts can be overrepresented (e.g., webpages in different languages might inflate the number of links to specific ROR-based URLs, being the number of referring domains a more accurate metric). These shortcomings must be minimized as much as possible applying severe data cleansing processes. While links counts to ROR-based URLs are (currently) unrelated to the scientific productivity or impact of organizations, the analysis of links to and from ROR-based URLs have been shown to be useful to map the degree of use and implementation of organization identifiers between institutions and scientific information systems. Since the creation of ROR is recent (2019), it is estimated that the number of journals, repositories and other databases will gradually incorporate links to ROR-based URLs in their products. The connectivity between DOIs, ORCIDs and RORs can be the spearhead to carry out new webometric studies, of interest to characterize the presence, impact, and interconnection of the global academic Web. Last, their use will increase as long it is embedded and popularised in the papers, as well as when the databases and search engines allow ROR searching as a field tag (similarly to DOI or ORCID searches). This will result in more effective implementation and popularisation on this new identifier, allowing further comprehensive and accurate studies (e.g., DOI-ROR or ORCID-ROR matches).