National ETD Repository Evaluation Using Web Analyzer: A Webometric Analysis of Shodhganga, India

ETDs are the Swiss-army-knife which has unearthed the shades of grey by bringing forth the until now hidden research to the forefront of the world. ETDs powered by open source software like DSpace, EPrints build up information ecosystem for effective storage and retrieval of theses and dissertations which take years of hard work to culminate. Such systems need to be evaluated as its purpose gets defeated if users find it hard to retrieve desired information from it. Webometrics involves the study of the web through which one can analyze the number of hyperlinks, type and structure of the hyperlinks, website usage and its effectiveness. The present article is an attempt to assess the performance of online portal of the national ETD repository of India by using Web Analyzer Test Score (WATS). It also highlights the status of Open Access (OA) ETD repositories with respect to other OA content like research papers, conference papers, etc. along with exploring the software used for Indian ETD Repositories. The overall score of the webometric analysis was found to be 6.4.