Disappearing act

Abstract

Purpose -The aim of this paper is to assess and catalogue the magnitude of URL attrition in a high-impact, open access (OA) general medical journal. Design/methodology/approach -All Public Library of Science Medicine (PLoS Medicine) articles for 2005-2007 were evaluated and the following items were assessed: number of entries per issue; type of article; number of references per entry; number of references that contained URLs; and the access date listed for each URL citation. URLs were then evaluated for accessibility status (i.e. active or defunct). Findings -In total, 1,133 articles were published from 2005-2007 in PLoS Medicine. The 1,133 articles contained 28,177 references, with 2,503 (8.9 per cent) identified as URLs. Non-research articles accounted for a substantially higher percentage of URL references (17.4 per cent) compared to research articles (4.2 per cent). Almost 17 per cent of the URL references were defunct and the rate of URL attrition increased as time elapsed.

Recovery of vanished URLs: Comparing the efficiency of Internet Archive and Google

“…They found that 26.08 per cent of all citations were not accessible during the time of testing and the majority of errors were due to HTTP 404 error code (not found). Nagaraja et al (2011) observed that "URL decay" rate was on the increase over time. They compared the loss of URLs for research articles (14.5%) and non-research articles (18%).…”

“…Internet based information is particularly useful for future researchers, since new conclusions and interpretations are based on previous research which also directs new research (Nagaraja et al 2011). It is noteworthy for a researcher to confirm the permanency of web based information.…”

URL normalization and assessing website structures in higher education websites

“…Normalized URLs are also less prone to URL attrition or “link rot” (Nagaraja et al , 2011), where URLs become broken over time as the pages are deleted or replacement pages with different URLs are created. Although Nagaraja’s research focused on the persistence of URLs in academic journals, a similar concern can be expressed with the organization of URLs connecting users to resources in other institutions.…”