Jointly published by AkadØmiai Kiad, Budapest Scientometrics, and Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht Vol. 60, No. 3 (2004) 475485 Received January 30, 2004 Address for correspondence: RONG TANG School of Library and Information Science, Catholic University of America 620 Michigan Avenue, NE, Washington, DC, 20064, USA E-mail: tangr@cua.edu 01389130/2004/US $ 20.00 Copyright ' 2004 AkadØmiai Kiad, Budapest All rights reserved Patterns of national and international Web inlinks to US academic departments: An analysis of disciplinary variations RONG TANG, a MIKE THELWALL b a School of Library and Information Science, Catholic University of America, Washington, DC (USA) b School of Computing and Information Technology, University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton (UK) An investigation of links to 89 US academic departments from three different disciplines gave insights into the kinds of international regions and national domains that linked to them. While significant correlations were found between total counts of international inlinks and total publication impact in Psychology and Chemistry, counts of international inlinks to History departments were too small to give a significant result. The correlations suggest that international links may reflect, to a certain extent, patterns of scholarly communication. Even though History departments attracted a significantly lower percentage of international inlinks than those of Chemistry and Psychology, the main source of links for all three disciplines was from Europe. Analyses of national inlinks, characterized by gTLDs (generic Top Level Domains), showed that the major source of links for all disciplines was .edu sites, followed by .com, .org, .net. As a whole, international regional differences in disciplines were stronger than gTLD differences, although in both cases discrepancies were not of a large scale. Background The Internet has forever changed the landscape of higher education. Web technology bestows upon institutes of higher education never-before capacities for the creation of learning communities that defy the constraints of time and distance as it provides access to knowledge that was once difficult to obtain  the Internet enables education to occur in places where there is none, extends resources where there are few, expands the learning day, and opens the learning place (WEB-BASED EDUCATION COMMISSION, 2000, p. i-iii.). With the emergence of distance learning, educational portals and virtual universities, the nature of higher education has been redefined, and the format of course instruction, knowledge delivery and dissemination has been transformed. All of this has fostered a world-wide education network and a global