Accessibility and decay of web citations in five open access ISI journals

Abstract

PurposeThe aim of this paper is to scrutinize the accessibility and decay of web references (URLs) cited in five open access social sciences journals indexed by ISI.Design/methodology/approachAfter acquiring all the papers published by these journals during 2002‐2007, their web citations were extracted and analyzed from an accessibility point of view. Moreover, for initially missed citations complementary pathways such as using Internet Explorer and the Google search engine were employed.FindingsThe study revealed that at first check 73 per cent of URLs are accessible, while 27 per cent have disappeared. It is notable that the rate of accessibility increased to 89 per cent and the rate of decay decreased to 11 per cent after using complementary pathways. The “.net” domain, with an availability of 96 per cent (a decay of 4 per cent) has the greatest stability and persistence among all domains, while the most stable file format is PDF, with an availability of 93 per cent (a decay of 7 per cent).Originality/valueGiven the inevitable, destructive and progressing decay phenomenon in web citations, after estimating the extent of this decay for five journals using innovative and standard methods, this paper suggests recommendations for preventing it. The paper carries research value for web content providers, publishers, editors, authors and researchers.

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

“…The URLs which end with only the slash (/) and none of the file format was mentioned has been considered as HTML file. Some 741 out of 1094 URLs were HTM/HTML/SHTML files followed by PDF (241) and PHP (48).This finding matches with the previous findings of McCown et al (2005), Maharana, Nayak, and Sahu (2006), Moghaddam and Saberi (2010), Saberi and Abedi (2012), Sampath Kumar and Vinay Kumar (2013 Figure 2 indicates that the recovery of vanishing URLs via Internet Archive (IA) is highest for all years than Google search engine. An attempt has been made to recover vanishing URLs through Internet Archive and the Google which increased the rate of active URLs.…”

Corrosion of URLs

“…Similar to previous studies by McCown, et al, (2005), Maharana, et al, (2006) and Saberi and Abedi (2012), the URLs in this study have been categorized into different file formats and presented in Table 8 for further analysis.…”

A systematic review of methods for studying consumer health YouTube videos, with implications for systematic reviews

“…Videos can be added or removed at any time by their publishers (or by the host, for violations of copyright or community guidelines), and the order of material in search results may change from day to day. The phenomenon of web resources disappearing is known as “decay” or “modification” (Bar-Ilan & Peritz, 2008; Saberi & Abedi, 2012). …”