Permanence of Web Page References—Reply

The present study makes an attempt to explore and analyze the growth and decay rate of URL citations cited in one of the eminent information web magazine ARIADNE. All the web citations cited in the featured article section of ARIADNE web magazine spanning a period of three years (2010-2012) were identified and downloaded. All the URLs provided in the web citations were checked by W3C link checker (http://validator.w3.org/checklink) to test whether they were accessible or not. Web resources are used more than the printed ones. Though the number of references in web based format is more in use but a significant number of web references lose their identity with the passage of time. The results indicate that early published papers have collectively a larger number of missing web citation compared to the recent ones. It was found that majority of errors were due to the missing content (http 404-file not found) representing 52.68% of all http error codes followed by "http 500" (24.73%) and "http 403" (19.35%). The ".com/.co" domain was also found to be the most stable and persistent domain with 95 per cent accessibility. The greatest number of web resources cited in the articles, were found to be of "html" and "htmls" formats and "ppt" files were found to be most stable with 100% accessibility. Finally, the study confirms that continued availability of web resources is not guaranteed because of the dying phenomenon of web based references, but there can be certain solutions (WebCite, LOCKSS etc) that can prevent the decay or disappearance of web citations.

To discover the current situation and characteristics of web citations accessibility, the present study examined the accessibility of 4,253 web citations in six key Iranian LIS journals published from 2006 to 2010. The proportion percentage of web citations increased from 11% in 2006 to 30% in 2010. The most widely cited top level domains in URLs include the .edu and .org with respectively 37% and 23%. This study provides further evidence that organizations websites have become increasingly vulnerable to URL decay. The results show that only 3467 web citations remain accessible in 2011, of which 71% allowed easy and long-term access to the authors" information intended in URLs. Long time inaccessibility to the authors" intended information was shown to be mostly from URLs that returned the 404 error and also the URLs that had gone through information update. An about 4 year half-life was estimated for Iran"s LIS Publications. Ultimately, the results suggest that the decay of URLs is a grave problem in the publication of Iran"s LIS researchers and cannot be overlooked. These authors need to gain the necessary knowledge about using web citations as major sources of information for their publications.

2020

2019

The present study is conducted to identify the prevailing citation trends, durability of web citations or URLs, decay and half-life of URLs by analyzing articles' citations of Indian Journal of Agricultural Library and Information Services published during 2012 -2016. A total of 980 citations were reported in 94 articles out of which 33.16 percent were having web citations. Of web citations, 62.15 percent of URLs were accessible at the time of testing and the remaining 37.85 percent of URLs were not accessible. HTTP error message 404 "page not found'' was the irresistible error message appeared and represented 51.22 percent of all HTTP error messages. Average half-life of URLs was estimated to be 4.62 years. There was no association found between path depth and decay of URLs. Articles accessed f rom domain .org, .net and .co/.com were found more alive than other domains.

2003

72 January 2003/Vol. 46, No. 1 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM form Resource Locators. URLs are a subset of the Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) that provide an abstract identification of a resource location [3]. In general, URLs consist of a scheme (such as http, ftp, or mailto) followed by a colon and a scheme-specific part. The syntax of the scheme-specific part can vary according to the scheme.

To discover the current situation and characteristics of web citations accessibility, the present study examined the accessibility of 4,253 web citations in six key Iranian LIS journals published from 2006 to 2010. The proportion percentage of web citations increased from 11% in 2006 to 30% in 2010. The most widely cited top level domains in URLs include the .edu and .org with respectively 37% and 23%. This study provides further evidence that organizations websites have become increasingly vulnerable to URL decay. The results show that only 3467 web citations remain accessible in 2011, of which 71% allowed easy and long-term access to the authors" information intended in URLs. Long time inaccessibility to the authors" intended information was shown to be mostly from URLs that returned the 404 error and also the URLs that had gone through information update. An about 4 year half-life was estimated for Iran"s LIS Publications. Ultimately, the results suggest that the decay of URLs is a grave problem in the publication of Iran"s LIS researchers and cannot be overlooked. These authors need to gain the necessary knowledge about using web citations as major sources of information for their publications.

Aslib Proceedings, 2013

PurposeThe aim of this study is to compare the situation of internet resource citations in scientific articles of the journals of Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences from 2005‐2009.Design/methodology/approachThe research method is an analytical survey with webometrics and citation analysis. The internet was used as a tool for accessing articles. They are separately analyzed on the basis of journal name and publication year. The analysis is done using MATLAB and Excel software.FindingsA total of 717 articles from seven journals during five years were reviewed. Of 13,448 citations extracted, 120 internet references were found. The final results indicated that the sum of web citations is less than 1 per cent of total citations and only 52 per cent of internet citations in studied journal articles are available. The average half‐life for the medical journals is estimated to be 1.02 years.Practical implicationsTo increase the rate of URLs availability, publishers should oblige...

New Media & Society, 2007

This exploratory study examines the use of online citations, focusing on five leading journals in journalism and communication. It analyzes 1126 URL reference addresses in citations of articles published between 2000 and 2003. The results show that only 61 percent of the online citations remain accessible in 2004 and 39 percent do not. The content analysis also shows that .org and .gov are the most stable domains. Error messages for `dead' URL addresses are explored. The instability of online citations raises concerns for researchers, editors and associations.

2005

We explore the availability and persistence of URLs cited in articles published in D-Lib Magazine. We extracted 4387 unique URLs referenced in 453 articles published from July 1995 to August 2004. The availability was checked three times a week for 25 weeks from September 2004 to February 2005. We found that approximately 28% of those URLs failed to resolve initially, and 30% failed to resolve at the last check. A majority of the unresolved URLs were due to 404 (page not found) and 500 (internal server error) errors. The content pointed to by the URLs was relatively stable; only 16% of the content registered more than a 1 KB change during the testing period. We explore possible factors which may cause a URL to fail by examining its age, path depth, top-level domain and file extension. Based on the data collected, we found the half-life of a URL referenced in a D-Lib Magazine article is approximately 10 years. We also found that URLs were more likely to be unavailable if they pointed to resources in the .net, .edu or country-specific top-level domain, used non-standard ports (i.e., not port 80), or pointed to resources with uncommon or deprecated extensions (e.g., .shtml, .ps, .txt).

2016