Abstract
Web links are a phenomenon of interest to bibliometricians by analogy with citations, and to others because of their use in Web navigation and search engines. It is known that very few links on university Web sites are targeted at scholarly expositions and yet, at least in the UK and Australia, a correlation has been established between link count metrics for universities and measures of institutional research. This paper operates on a finer‐grained level of detail, focussing on counts of links between pairs of universities. It provides evidence of an underlying linear relationship with the quadruple product of the size and research quality of both source and target institution. This simple model is proposed as applying generally to national university systems, subject to a series of constraints to identify cases where it is unlikely to be applicable. It is hoped that the model, if confirmed by studies of other countries, will open the door to deeper mining of academic Web link data.