The decay and persistence of web references

The purpose of this study is to identify the persistence and decay of uniform resource locator (URLs) associated with Web references. The decaying of Web references is analyzed in relation to their age, domain, technical errors and error codes.

The Web references of the Journal of Informetrics were selected for analysis and interpretation to fulfill the set objectives. The references of all the scholarly articles, excluding editorials and reviews published in the Journal of Informetrics for five years from 2007 to 2011 were recorded in a text file. Later, the URLs were extracted from the articles to verify their accessibility in terms of persistence and decay. The collected data were then transferred into an excel file and tabulated for further analysis and interpretation using simple statistical techniques.

The results showed that of the total 7,409 citations retrieved from 221 articles, 358 citations (4.8%) were Web citations. These Web citations were assessed to find their persistence and decay. The results reveal that 115 (32.12%) Web references were missing or dead. The most common error associated with the missing Web citations was Error 404 Page not found, contributing 60% of the total missing citations, followed by 400 Bad Request Error (35.65%). The domain analysis of missing Web citations depicts that most of the missing URLs were associated with the .gov domain (40%), followed by .edu (29.58%) and .com (26.04%).

The Web references of a single journal, namely, Journal of Informetrics, were analyzed for five years, and hence, the generalization of findings needs to be cautioned.

The URL decay is becoming a major problem in the preservation and citation of the Web resources, and collaborative efforts are needed to reduce the decaying of URLs.

A good number of studies have been conducted to analyze the persistence and decay of Web references, as it is the hot topic of research across disciplines, and this study is a step further in the same direction.