Research Information Management by Sri Lankan Universities: A webometric analysis

Abstract

Universities are playing a vital role in the research and development of the country. Rapidly growing scholarly communities are connected electronically to their peers, colleagues, academic administrators, funding agencies and policymakers. In this situation, research information management has become important for the universities to organize, manage, preserve, evaluate, assess and disseminate their scholarly work. Research information includes researcher profile and affiliation, grants, projects, funding, publications, patents, awards and scholarly impact. This study aims to observe how Sri Lankan universities manage their research information through their websites. Seventeen universities' websites were analyzed for its research information management, such as data on people, research facilities, research projects, and research output. The result of this study reveals that ten universities have a separate menu for "Research", three universities have staff profiles through a single link, eight universities have displayed their research facilities, and fifteen universities have maintained their research repository to showcase their research output. Further, research information displayed through the university websites was discussed and scattered under different web pages and systems. In this conjunction, research performance and its progress could not reach its target audience and did not satisfy the stakeholders' expectations. Finally, it was recommended to develop a single system to manage research information using suitable applications available in the market.