These images are part of a paper that aims at mapping the web presence of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) on the level of universities using hyperlinks and analyzing the topology of the European academic network. Its purpose is to combine methods from Social Network Analysis (SNA) and cybermetric techniques in order to ask for tendencies of integration of the European universities visible in their web presence and the role of different universities in the process of the emergence of an European Research Area.
In 2004, 535 universities of 14 European countries were selected from Webometrics Ranking of World Universities (www.webometrics.org). This site ranks 3,000 universities according to two main criteria: size (number of pages and rich files) and visibility (number of incoming links). This set of European universities were mapped according to the link relationships among them.
The key result of the paper, as explained by the authors, is that the European network is set up by the aggregation of well-defined national networks, whereby the German and British networks are dominant. The national networks are connected to each other through outstanding national universities in each country.