An Assessment of the Completeness of Scholarly Information on the Internet

Abstract

In this paper, the authors propose an assessment framework of the completeness of scholarly information on the Internet, and then obtain a list of Web pages by searching for 32 key terms in eight subjects through Google, Yahoo, and Altavista. The 2,814 sample pages are examined according to the evaluation framework. The results reveal that the overall mean score of the completeness of online scholarly information was 2.92; only 11 percent of samples provide complete scholarly information. There is a statistically significant difference (P<0.05) in the completeness of those Web pages with various domain names, resource types, and subjects. In conclusion, the completeness of scholarly information on the Internet is unsatisfactory and needs to be improved immediately. Furthermore, the evaluation framework and its application developed herein could be a useful instrument for librarians, researchers, students, and the public to select Internet resources.