Dead Science: Most Resources Linked in Biomedical Articles Disappear in Eight Years

Zeng, Tong; Shema, Alain; Acuña, Daniel E.

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-15742-5_16

Cited by 12 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 15 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The total number of URLs in this sample was 5.1 times greater than the original study even though both studies examined a sample of 3 years of the same 5 journals. This large increase in the total number of URLs cited in the scholarly literature has also been reported by numerous other studies, including a recent paper analyzing URL decay in the biomedical literature [19], and papers mapping the literature of healthcare management [17], dental hygiene [20], and pediatric nursing [21].…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 65%

The continued problem of URL decay: an updated analysis of health care management journal citations

Howell¹,

Burtis²

2023

jmla

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Objective: This study updates a 2009 study which examined uniform resource locator (URL) decay in health care management journals and seeks to determine whether continued URL availability relates to publication date, resource type, or top-level domain. The authors also provide an analysis of differences in findings between the two study periods.Methods: The authors collected the URLs of web-based resources cited in articles published in five health care management source journals from 2016 to 2018. The URLs were checked to see if they were still active and then analyzed to determine if continued availability was related to publication date, resource type, or top-level domain.Results: There were statistically significant differences in URL availability across publication date, resource type, and top-level domain. Domains with the highest rate of decay were .com and .net and the lowest rate were .edu and .gov. As expected, the older the citation, the higher the rate of decay. The overall rate of URL decay decreased from 49.3% to 36.1% between studies.Conclusion: URL decay in health care management journals has decreased in the last 15 years. Still, URL decay does continue to be a problem. Interestingly, health services policy research journals had a lower rate of decay than practitioner-oriented journals (34.8% vs. 51.7%). Authors, publishers, and librarians should continue to promote the use of digital object identifiers and web archiving and perhaps study and replicate efforts used by health services policy research journals to increase continued URL availability rates.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 65%

The continued problem of URL decay: an updated analysis of health care management journal citations

Howell¹,

Burtis²

2023

jmla

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This DOI is used by scientists to cite Figshare resources using traditional citation methods. Figshare makes the research data publicly and permanently available which mitigates the resource decay problem and improves research reproducibility (Zeng et al, 2019). A Figshare DOI contains the string 'figshare' (e.g., '10.6084/m9.figshare.6741260').…”

Section: Genbankmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assigning credit to scientific datasets using article citation networks

Zeng

Bratt

et al. 2020

Journal of Informetrics

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A citation is a well-established mechanism for connecting scientific artifacts. Citation networks are used by citation analysis for a variety of reasons, prominently to give credit to scientists' work. However, because of current citation practices, scientists tend to cite only publications, leaving out other types of artifacts such as datasets. Datasets then do not get appropriate credit even though they are increasingly reused and experimented with. We develop a network flow measure, called DATARANK, aimed at solving this gap. DATARANK assigns a relative value to each node in the network based on how citations flow through the graph, differentiating publication and dataset flow rates. We evaluate the quality of DATARANK by estimating its accuracy at predicting the usage of real datasets: web visits to GenBank and downloads of Figshare datasets. We show that DATARANK is better at predicting this usage compared to alternatives while offering additional interpretable outcomes. We discuss improvements to citation behavior and algorithms to properly track and assign credit to datasets.

show abstract

“…Klein et al observed that one out of five Science, Technology, and Medicine articles suffering from reference rot, meaning it is impossible to revisit the web context that surrounds them after their publication [47]. Zeng et al observed that most resources linked in biomedical articles disappear in 8 years [48].…”

Section: Broken Links Across the Internetmentioning

confidence: 99%

Broken External Links on Stack Overflow

Liu,

Xia,

et al. 2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Stack Overflow hosts valuable programming-related knowledge with 11,926,354 links that reference to the third-party websites. The links that reference to the resources hosted outside the Stack Overflow websites extend the Stack Overflow knowledge base substantially. However, with the rapid development of programming-related knowledge, many resources hosted on the Internet are not available anymore. Based on our analysis of the Stack Overflow data that was released on Jun. 2, 2019, 14.2% of the links on Stack Overflow are broken links. The broken links on Stack Overflow can obstruct viewers from obtaining desired programming-related knowledge, and potentially damage the reputation of the Stack Overflow as viewers might regard the posts with broken links as obsolete. In this paper, we characterize the broken links on Stack Overflow. 65% of the broken links in our sampled questions are used to show examples, e.g., code examples. 70% of the broken links in our sampled answers are used to provide supporting information, e.g., explaining a certain concept and describing a step to solve a problem. Only 1.67% of the posts with broken links are highlighted as such by viewers in the posts' comments. Only 5.8% of the posts with broken links removed the broken links. Viewers cannot fully rely on the vote scores to detect broken links, as broken links are common across posts with different vote scores. The websites that host resources that can be maintained by their users are referenced by broken links the most on Stack Overflow -a prominent example of such websites is GitHub. The posts and comments related to the web technologies, i.e., JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and jQuery, are associated with more broken links. Based on our findings, we shed lights for future directions and provide recommendations for practitioners and researchers.

show abstract

Dead Science: Most Resources Linked in Biomedical Articles Disappear in Eight Years

Cited by 12 publications

References 15 publications

The continued problem of URL decay: an updated analysis of health care management journal citations

The continued problem of URL decay: an updated analysis of health care management journal citations

Assigning credit to scientific datasets using article citation networks

Broken External Links on Stack Overflow

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About