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The purpose of this paper is to know the rate of loss of online citations used as references in scholarly journals. It also indented to recover the vanished online citations using Wayback Machine and also to calculate the half-life period of online citations.

The study selected three journals published by Emerald publication. All 389 articles published in these three scholarly journals were selected. A total of 15,211 citations were extracted of which 13,281 were print citations and only 1,930 were online citations. The online citations so extracted were then tested to determine whether they were active or missing on the Web. W3C Link Checker was used to check the existence of online citations. The online citations which got HTTP error message while testing for its accessibility were then entered in to the search box of the Wayback Machine to recover vanished online citations.

Study found that only 12.69 percent (1,930 out of 15,211) citations were online citations and the percentage of online citations varied from a low of 9.41 in the year 2011 to high of 17.52 in the year 2009. Another notable finding of the research was that 30.98 percent of online citations were not accessible (vanished) and remaining 69.02 percent of online citations were still accessible (active). The HTTP 404 error message – “page not found” was the overwhelming message encountered and represented 62.98 percent of all HTTP error message. It was found that the Wayback Machine had archived only 48.33 percent of the vanished web pages, leaving 51.67 percent still unavailable. The half-life of online citations was increased from 5.40 years to 11.73 years after recovering the vanished online citations.

This is a systematic and in-depth study on recovery of vanished online citations cited in journals articles spanning a period of five years. The findings of the study will be helpful to researchers, authors, publishers, and editorial staff to recover vanishing online citations using Wayback Machine.

This study aims to examine the availability and persistence of universal resource locators (URLs) cited in scholarly articles published in selected health journals based in East Africa.

Four health sciences online journals in East Africa were selected for this study. In this study, all Web citations in the selected journal articles covering the 2001-2015 period were extracted. This study explored the number of URLs used as citations, determined the rate of URLs’ loss, identified error messages associated with inaccessible URLs, identified the top domain levels of decayed URLs, calculated the half-life of the Web citations and determined the proportion of recovered URL citations through the Internet Wayback Machine.

In total, 822 articles were published between 2001 and 2015. There were in total 17,609 citations of which, only 574 (3.3 per cent) were Web citations. The findings show that 253 (44.1 per cent) Web citations were inaccessible and the “404 File Not Found” error message was the most (88.9 per cent) encountered. Top-level domains with country endings had the most (23.7 per cent) missing URLs. The average half-life for the URLs cited in journal articles was 10.5 years. Only 36 (6.3 per cent) Web references were recovered through the Wayback Machine.

This is a comprehensive study of East African health sciences online journals that provides findings that raises questions as to whether URLs should continue to be included as part of bibliographic details in the lists of references. It also calls for concerted efforts from various actors in overcoming the problem of URL decay.

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.

Using Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, higher education web sites were retrospectively analyzed to study the effects that technological advances in web design have had on accessibility for persons with disabilities.

A convenience sample of higher education web sites was studied for years 1997‐2002. The homepage and pages 1‐level down were evaluated. Web accessibility barrier (WAB) and complexity scores were calculated. Repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to determine trends in the data and Pearson's correlation (r) was computed to evaluate the relationship between accessibility and complexity.

Higher education web sites become progressively inaccessible as complexity increases.

The WAB score is a proxy of web accessibility. While the WAB score can give an indication of the accessibility of a web site, it cannot differentiate between barriers posing minimal limitations and those posing absolute inaccessibility. A future study is planned to have users with disabilities examine web sites with differing WAB scores to correlate how well the WAB score is gauging accessibility of web sites from the perspective of the user.

Findings from studies such as this can lead to improved guidelines, policies, and overall awareness of web accessibility for persons with disabilities.

There are limited studies that have taken a longitudinal look at the accessibility of web sites and explored the reasons for the trend of decreasing accessibility.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze to what extent changes in corporate websites reflect firms’ survival. Since keeping a website online involves some costs, it is likely that firms would invest resources on it only when they are active and healthy. Therefore, when a firm dies, this event is likely to be manifested on its website as lacking updates or being down.

Changes in the corporate websites of a panel of Spanish firms were tracked between 2008 and 2014 in order to evaluate the approach. The status of websites, classified according to the type of change undergone, was used to infer firms’ activity status (active or inactive). Multi-period logistic regressions and a duration model were applied to study the relationship among the website status and the firm’s status.

Results showed that changes in website contents clearly reflect the firm’s status. Active firms were mainly associated with updated corporate websites, while inactive firms were more associated with down websites. In fact, results confirmed that the firms’ death hazard increases when the website activity lowers.

Although online information is increasingly being used to monitor the economy, this is the first study to connect online data to firms’ survival. The results revealed a new source of information about business demography and evidenced corporate websites as a fresh source of high granularity business data.

Open access (OA) electronic journals have been identified as potentially at risk of loss without more coordinated preservation efforts. The purpose of this paper is to test the current availability of OA electronic journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

Using publicly available journal metadata downloaded from DOAJ, individual journal URLs were tested for validity and accessibility using a Microsoft Excel Visual Basic for Applications macro.

Initial results showed 69.51 per cent of the URLs tested returned a successful HTTP status code. The remainder of the URLs returned codes that indicated redirection or errors.

Unlike past studies of link decay, this is not limited to cited references or a specific discipline. This study uses the full DOAJ metadata to analyze the persistence of OA electronic journals.