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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.

The purpose of the present study is to identify the active and dead links of uniform resource locators (URLs) associated with web references and to compare the effectiveness of Chrome, Google and WayBack Machine in retrieving the dead URLs.

The web references of the Library Hi Tech from 2004 to 2008 were selected for analysis to fulfill the set objectives. The URLs were extracted from the articles to verify their accessibility in terms of persistence and decay. The URLs were then executed directly in the internet browser (Chrome), search engine (Google) and Internet Archive (WayBack Machine). The collected data were recorded in an excel file and presented in tables/diagrams for further analysis.

From the total of 1,083 web references, a maximum number was retrieved by the WayBack Machine (786; 72.6 per cent) followed by Google (501; 46.3 per cent) and the lowest by Chrome (402; 37.1 per cent). The study concludes that the WayBack Machine is more efficient, retrieves a maximum number of missing web citations and fulfills the mission of preservation of web sources to a larger extent.

A good number of studies have been conducted to analyze the persistence and decay of web-references; however, the present study is unique as it compared the dead URL retrieval effectiveness of internet explorer (Chrome), search engine giant (Google) and WayBack Machine of the Internet Archive.

The web references of a single journal, namely, Library Hi Tech, were analyzed for 5 years only. A major study across disciplines and sources may yield better results.

URL decay is becoming a major problem in the preservation and citation of web resources. The study has some healthy recommendations for authors, editors, publishers, librarians and web designers to improve the persistence of web references.

The main purpose of the present study is to examine the availability and persistence of URL citations in two LIS open access journals. It also intended to calculate the half‐life period of URL citations cited in journal articles.

A total of 2,890 URL citations cited in 689 research articles published in LIS journals spanning a period of 14 years (1996‐2009) were extracted. In order to check the accessibility of URL citations, W3C link checker was used. After the initial check, inactive URL citations were listed. Domains and HTTP errors associated with inactive URL citations were identified for further analysis. The half‐life period was calculated using the formula t(h)=[t ln(0.5)]/[ln W(t)−ln W(0)].

The research findings indicated that 57.61 percent (397 of 689) of articles have URL citations and percentage of URL citations increased from 5.98 percent in 1996 to 27.79 percent in 2009. It was found that 26.08 percent 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). The domains.net and.gov were more stable compared to the domains.com/.co,.org, and.edu. The half‐life was computed to be approximately 11.5 years, which compares favorably against earlier research works.

This is a comprehensive study on the availability and persistence of URL citations cited in LIS journals articles spanning a period of 14 years. The findings of the study will be helpful to authors, publishers and editorial staff to improve existing URL citation conventions and to promote URL use to ensure that URL citations are accessible in future.

The 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.

After 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.

The 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).

Given 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.

The purpose of this paper is to revisit a decade after its conception the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style and analyzes its relevance to address current challenges from the Library and Information Science (LIS) discipline.

Conceptual aspects of REST are reviewed and a generic architecture to support REST is presented. The relevance of the architecture is demonstrated with the help of a case study based on the collection registration database of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

The authors argue that the “resources and representations” model of REST is a sustainable way for the management of web resources in a context of constant technological evolutions.

When making information resources available on the web, a resource-oriented publishing model can avoid the costs associated with the creation of multiple interfaces.

This paper re-examines the conceptual merits of REST and translates the architecture into actionable recommendations for institutions that publish resources.

The worldwide web is growing at an enormous speed and web citations are becoming very common in scholarly publications. However the major problem of web citation is its persistence since citations disappear over time, causing accessibility problems for readers. In this context the present study aims to investigate the availability of web citations and their persistence in Indian Library and Information Science literature. The study also aims to investigate types of link accessibility errors encountered, domains associated with missing web citations and the correlation between the path depth and missing web citations.

The web citations (URLs) from 350 articles published in Indian Association of Teachers in Library and Information Science (IATLIS) conference volume (2001‐2008) were extracted and then tested to determine the accessibility. The W3C Link Checker (http://validator.w3.org/checklink) was used to evaluate links associated with a cited web resource. This link checker tests a submitted web page for broken or non‐valid hypertext links and reports the types of HTTP messages encountered.

Results of the study show that the average citations per article have been increased substantially from 0.25 (in the year 2001) to 3.02 (in the year 2008). It also found that 45.61 per cent of citations are not accessible during the time of testing, and the majority of web citations show HTTP Error Code 404 (63.84 per cent). Web citations from the .org domain are found to have the highest failure rates (30.29 per cent) compared to .edu (21.49 per cent) and .com/.co (14.33 per cent) domains.

The researchers analysed 673 web citations from 350 articles published during 2001 to 2008 in IATLIS conference volumes. The study investigated the percentage of missing web citations and domains associated with missing web citations. The study suggests some possible solutions to improve web citation accessibility. This carries research value for web content providers, web authors and researchers in library and information science.

The 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.

The 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.

A 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.

To increase the rate of URLs availability, publishers should oblige authors to utilize online archives such as WebCite to preserve expected information for all of the citations referred to in their articles.

This research would be valuable since it is the first that studies stability and persistence of URL domains of medical journals published in Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences according to type of domain names and file extensions. Moreover, this is the first time that the half‐life for medical universities web citations is calculated.

This research aims to study the state of online resources cited in scholarly library and information science (LIS) journals which are ranked in ISI and available in the Emerald database in terms of accessibility and decay.

Four LIS journals published by Emerald were selected from Thomson Reuters' JCR. The journals' issues from 2005 to 2008 were downloaded directly from the publisher web site and checked in terms of decay and availability of individual cited URLs.

Original accessibility of studied online resources was 64 percent, which improved to 95 percent. The main adopted strategies that returned more results were using the Wayback Machine and Google, which revived online resources by 17 percent and 12 percent respectively.

To increase the rate of web citations accessibility, some recommendations, including avoiding long URLs, citing documents found in digital collections availability on the web, working through systematic checking of the web citations before publication, getting backup of cited information, using the more stable file formats and domains, and utilizing tools like WebCite^®‐enhanced reference and a digital object identifier (DOI^®) system are suggested.

A study which examines the accessibility and decay of web citations used by authors of articles published in ISI‐ranked LIS journals available in the Emerald database has not been already done. This paper can thus contribute to the knowledge of this field as well as quality of such literature for web content providers and publishers, authors and researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to replicate and extend research on reference list accuracy to determine whether the same phenomenon exists across disciplines and whether similar conclusions can be drawn.

Three hypotheses were tested and verified to determine consistency of findings from previous studies and across disciplines. A fourth hypothesis was introduced to investigate the impact of an increasing number of citations to internet resources.

The study demonstrates some similar patterns to previously reported research. However, the existence of errors in references to journal articles usually did not prevent locating an article. More significantly for fashion scholarship, there were a higher number of citations to URLs than journal articles. Given the high rate of irretrievability for the URL citations in the study, this may have a negative impact on future intellectual contributions.

If decreasing internet content persistence continues, scholarship credibility will be increasingly difficult to maintain. Further research should investigate the retrievability of websites if URLs are incorrectly referenced, given other information provided in the references.

Not only should authors submit the first page or title page of all referenced print materials to editors for reference list accuracy verification, print‐outs of referenced web sites including the URL and access date should be provided.

Irretrievability rates of citations to internet URLs were found to be substantially higher than those of journal articles. This should be of concern to all authors of scholarly works.

The present study compares the use of web citations as references in leading scholarly journals in Library and Information Science (LIS) and Communication and Media Studies (CMS). A total of 20 journals (each 10 from LIS and CMS) were selected based on the publishing history and reputation published between 2008 and 2017.

The present study compares the use of web citations as references in leading scholarly journals in LIS and CMS. A PHP script was used to crawl the Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) collected from the reference list. A total of 12,251 articles were downloaded and 555,428 references were extracted. Of the 555,428 references, 102,718 web citations were checked for their accessibility.

The research findings indicated that 76.90% URLs from LIS journals and 84.32% URLs from Communication and Media Studies journals were accessible and others were rotten. The majority of errors were due to HTTP 404 error code (not found) in both the disciplines. The study also tried to retrieve the rotten URLs through Time Travel, which revived 61.76% rotten URLs in LIS journal articles and 65.46% in CMS journal articles.

This is an in-depth and comprehensive comparative study on the availability of web citations in LIS and CMS journals articles spanning a period of 10 years. The findings of the study will be helpful to authors, publishers, and editorial staff to ensure that web citations will be accessible in the future.