A co-link analysis of institutions of higher learning in Eastern and Southern Africa: preliminary findings

Abstract

This paper presents the preliminary findings of a co-link analysis of 95 (out of a total of 142) institutions of higher education in eastern and southern Africa. Data was collected using a uniform search strategy, i.e. two search queries were used to extract relevant data from the Yahoo! search engine. Data was captured and stored in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets as 2-dimensional matrices. UCINET version 6 (comprising of several analytic technologies) was primarily used to analyse the data in order to: find out the number of external inlinks for each institution; determine the most colinked institutions; map the colinkages; measure the strengths of colink ties; examine colink relationships; and establish the motivations for colinking. For the purposes of presenting the findings, 40 institutions which recorded a normalised colink count of 1.5 and more were selected. Results indicate that most South African institutions have the highest number of inlink and colink counts. Insitutions belonging to the same geographic region established closer relationships amongst themselves than institutions located in different geographic regions. The institutions which yielded fewer inlinks and higher colink counts produced stronger colink ties. Other findings, conclusions and recommendations are provided.