A study of missing Web-cites in scholarly articles: towards an evaluation framework

Abstract

Abstract.This paper reports on a study that examined citation practice in a set of scholarly papers. After evaluating 2162 bibliographic references it was found that 48.1% (1041) of all citations used in the papers referred to a Web-located resource. A significant number of references to URLs were found to be missing (45.8%) and an evaluation of these Web-located citations allowed the average half-life (4.8 years) for these missing resources to be determined. The study also examined the composition of the top-level domains associated with resource Journal of Information Science, © CILIP 2004

Reference Rot in the Repository: A Case Study of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) in an Academic Library

“…5,6,7 In 2015, upon the twenty-year benchmark of the original data collection, Oguz and Koehler reported in JASIS that only 2 of the original links remained active. 8 A number of foundational studies, including Casserly and Bird, 9 Spinellis, 10 Sellitto, 11 Falagas, Karveli, and Tritsaroli, 12 and Wagner et al 13 have reported on linkrot occurring in professional literature. Sanderson, Phillips, and Van de Sompel provide a table of 17 well-known linkrot studies, comparing overall benchmarks, and supplying a succinct summary of the scope of each study.…”

An empirical study of the accessibility of web references in two Chinese academic journals

“…Citation content, URL domain and URL directory depth were associated with availability. SELLITTO [2004SELLITTO [ , 2005 examined the permanence of 1,043 web-located citations in 123 academic conference articles published between 1995 and 2003. He found that 45.8% of web-located citations could not be accessed, with the HTTP 404 "Page not found" message (61.5%) being the greatest cause.…”

Decay and half-life period of online citations cited in open access journals

“…Previous studies have also showed that many URLs cited in research articles have disappeared because of several reasons (Aronsky, Madani, Carnevale, Duda, & Feyder, 2007;Carnevale & Aronsky, 2005;Goh & Ng, 2007;Lopresti, 2010;McCown et al, 2005;Sellitto, 2004). Keeping in view the disappearance nature of URL citations, this study made an attempt to investigate the availability and decay online citations cited in Science and Social Science open access journals published during 2000e2009.…”

“…Formal references to information on the web are becoming increasingly common (Lawrence et al, 2001). Many early studies (Hester et al, 2004;Moghaddam et al, 2010;Olfson & Lawrence, 2005;Sellitto, 2004;Veena & Sampath Kumar, 2008;Wu, 2009;Yang et al, 2010) have proved that authors of scientific articles include references accessible only through the web.…”