Scholarly Context Adrift: Three out of Four URI References Lead to Changed Content

Abstract

Increasingly, scholarly articles contain URI references to “web at large” resources including project web sites, scholarly wikis, ontologies, online debates, presentations, blogs, and videos. Authors reference such resources to provide essential context for the research they report on. A reader who visits a web at large resource by following a URI reference in an article, some time after its publication, is led to believe that the resource’s content is representative of what the author originally referenced. However, due to the dynamic nature of the web, that may very well not be the case. We reuse a dataset from a previous study in which several authors of this paper were involved, and investigate to what extent the textual content of web at large resources referenced in a vast collection of Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM) articles published between 1997 and 2012 has remained stable since the publication of the referencing article. We do so in a two-step approach that relies on various well-established similarity measures to compare textual content. In a first step, we use 19 web archives to find snapshots of referenced web at large resources that have textual content that is representative of the state of the resource around the time of publication of the referencing paper. We find that representative snapshots exist for about 30% of all URI references. In a second step, we compare the textual content of representative snapshots with that of their live web counterparts. We find that for over 75% of references the content has drifted away from what it was when referenced. These results raise significant concerns regarding the long term integrity of the web-based scholarly record and call for the deployment of techniques to combat these problems.

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

“…18 Though the study focused on STM articles, its authors drew attention to theses and dissertations as a susceptible class of material. Analyzing the same set of links extracted from this large STM corpus, Jones et al (2016) …”

Linkkimätä + sisältönyrjähdys = viitemätä

“…Jopa 65 % sivustoista muuttuu melko usein, 123 tunnin välein. Muutoksia on enemmän ja useammin suosituilla sivustoilla 4 ja pitkissä dokumenteissa 6 . Jones SM ym.…”

“…Jones SM ym. 6 vertasivat Hiberlink -projektin aineiston URI-viitteitä verkkoarkistoista löy-tyviin versioihin julkaisuajankohdalta ja totesivat, että 184.065 URI-viitteen sisältö kaikkiaan 241.091 viitteestä oli muuttunut julkaisu-ja tutkimusajankohtien välillä. Toisin sanoen URIviitteistä ainoastaan 23,65 % oli pysynyt sisällöl-tään samana.…”

“…Termiä käytettiin ensimmäisenä Hiberlink -projektissa 6 . Viitemätä aiheuttaa sen, ettei lähteenä käyte-tyn URI-viittauksen nykyinen sisältö vastaa viittausajankohdan mennyttä sisältöä.…”

Persistence Statements: Describing Digital Stickiness

“…For want of a better term, we will refer to "persistent identifiers" for objects that can change or disappear, irrespective of the intentions or purposes of the provider. Even scholarly articles suffer from link rot (Klein et al 2014) and context drift (Jones et al 2016) at astounding rates. But PIDs are the central approach taken to insulate users from the changes to which objects are subject, and we will be careful to distinguish between PIDs and the objects they identify.…”