Dot-science top level domain: Academic websites or dumpsites?

Dot-science was launched in 2015 as a new academic top-level domain aimed to provide ‘a dedicated, easily accessible location for global Internet users with an interest in science’. The main objective of this work is to find out the general scholarly usage of this top-level domain. In particular, the following three questions are pursued: usage (number of web domains registered with the dot-science), purpose (main function and category of websites linked to these web domains), and impact (websites’ visibility and authority). To do this, 13,900 domain names were gathered through ICANN’s Domain Name Registration Data Lookup database. Each web domain was subsequently categorized, and data on web impact were obtained from Majestic’s API. Based on the results obtained, it is concluded that the dot-science top-level domain is scarcely adopted by the academic community, and mainly used by registrar companies for reselling purposes (35.5% of all web domains were parked). Websites receiving the highest number of backlinks were generally related to non-academic websites applying intensive link building practices and offering leisure or even fraudulent contents. Majestic’s trust flow metric has been proved an effective method to filter reputable academic websites. As regards primary academic-related dot-science web domain categories, 1175 (8.5% of all web domains registered) were found, mainly personal academic websites (342 web domains), blogs (261) and research groups (133). All dubious content reveals bad practices on the Web, where the tag ‘science’ is fundamentally used as a mechanism to deceive search engine algorithms.