Web structure and influence of the Arab universities of the MENA zone (Middle East and North Africa): Visualization and analysis

The geopolitical zone known as MENA (Middle East and North Africa), occupying so many newspaper front pages last year owing to the " Arab spring " in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria, is at the same time largely ignored by the realm of webometrics, scientometrics, and information visualization. The MENA zone would include all 22 countries whose official language is Arabic, and which also belong to the League of Arab States and Yemen. The MENA zone takes in countries of two geographic areas –the Middle East and northeastern Africa– that are often studied separately, despite their many cultural, social, economic, political and religious points in common. Precisely these aspects, plus the relations or interactions among the respective countries, governments, organizations and institutions, and their degree of development, become determinant factors in the overall influence of a country, the intellectual weight of its institutions in the regional context, and the predominance of certain universities. Studies of interaction among universities are usually approached through their web links, which serve to gauge the comparative influence of each academic institution. The World Wide Web (3W) has come to be a foremost source of information about a wide array of areas, as well as a vital channel of communication for persons, companies and societies (Al-Dwairi, Faba-Perez and Vargas-Quesada, 2010). Webometrics, based on these information sources, aspires to generate new knowledge that helps explain phenomena of the 3W arena. Indeed, aspects such as web activity or output are used to evaluate the educational and scientific activity of a country and its grid of institutions. We presently dispose of web indicators with academic results As far as we can see, however, there is no panoramic study of the web structure of the Arab countries that assesses their collective or relative influence. Some authors have explored the development and representation of the web at a national level within the Arab world; output from Spain includes works by Thelwall and Aguillo (2003) and Ortega and Aguillo (2007). Canadian universities have been explored by Vaughan and Thelwall (2005) and Vaughan (2006). There are respective studies of Scandinavia by Ortega and Aguillo (2008b) and of Finland by Holmberg and Thelwall (2009). Supranational analyses carried out by Thelwall (2002c) and Tang and Thelwall (2004) discovered that European universities were grouped into national or local sub-networks, connected to others on the basis of linguistic or geographical criteria. Somewhat later, Heimeriks and van den …