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By studying a large number of citations in the LIS field, this paper seeks to examine carefully the persistence status of web resources specified by their domains and type of files.

All 2005‐2008 volumes of six LIS journals ranked by ISI Thomson Reuters were selected. From 1,181 papers, 37,791 citations were recorded. Only original articles, which had a list of references, were included in the study. The persistence of web citations was checked by directly following the cited URLs.

Of the 37,791 citations, 4,840 (12.8 percent) were web citations. The means per articles of web and print citations were 4.09, and 27.9, respectively. Of all web citations, 4,617 (95 percent) were readily persistent, and 5 percent returned errors and thus were not originally accessible. The relationship between the print and web citation over time (year) was significant. The most prevalent domain of citations was html and the most favorable and persistent file format was pdf.

The web resources are used for their easy accessibility and the support they provide for a scientific content. While direct accessibility to a web citation is not provided, many strategies are adopted to recover the dead citation. The issue is to what extent the authors rely on web resources and are they finished with citing paper‐based materials? Are web resources becoming replaced with their print counterparts? The study showed that scholars still rely more on print resources than on the web materials.

Tracking current trends in scholars' communication behavior shows a shift from print to web resources. The paper examines web citations persistence in some prestigious journals to show whether the web citations are reliable enough and always accessible in the digital world.

The essential purpose of this paper is to measure the amount of web resources used for scholarly contributions in the area of library and information science (LIS) in India. It further aims to make an analysis of the nature and type of web resources and studies the various standards for web citations.

In this study, the result of analysis of 292 web citations spread over 95 scholarly papers published in the proceedings of the National Conference of the Society for Information Science, India (SIS‐2005) has been reported. All the 292 web citations were scanned and data relating to types of web domains, file formats, styles of citations, etc., were collected through a structured check list. The data thus obtained were systematically analyzed, figurative representations were made and appropriate interpretations were drawn.

The study revealed that 292 (34.88 per cent) out of 837 were web citations, proving a significant correlation between the use of Internet resources and research productivity of LIS professionals in India. The highest number of web citations (35.6 per cent) was from .edu/.ac type domains. Most of the web resources (46.9 per cent) cited in the study were hypertext markup language (HTML) files.

The paper is the result of an original analysis of web citations undertaken in order to study the dependence of LIS professionals in India on web sources for their scholarly contributions. This carries research value for web content providers, authors and researchers in LIS.

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 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 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.

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 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.

The purpose of this paper is to gain knowledge about the status and characteristics of the current web citations in published articles by Iranian researchers in the Science Citation Index (SCI). Besides investigating the growth in the presence of web resources in publications, the paper examines the accessibility and decay of web resources. Furthermore, the author will examine the provided information by the URLs to determine whether the cited contents by the authors signify the same information as the URLs.

The author used the survey research method. Thus, all documents by Iranian chemistry researchers recorded in the SCI database during 2006‐2009 were identified and then transferred to an Excel base. After a one‐by‐one examination, 46,762 web citations were extracted from a total number of 10,333 documents and were then analyzed, with the aid of two research assistants, in two months time (November and December of 2010), as specified in the research objectives. The citations were categorized into nine groups based on the feedback from the URLs' entries in the Internet Explorer browser.

The results showed that 46,762 citations (20 percent) of the total 187,823 available citations in the articles included web citations. The proportion percentage of web citations increased from 9 percent in 2006 to 39 percent in 2009. The average number of web citations for every article is 4.52. The most widely cited top level domains in URLs include the.org and.edu with, respectively, 31 percent and 23 percent; and when compared to other domains they reveal a greater tendency for stability. The highest percentage of inactive URLs was found to be associated with the .gov top level domain. Ultimately, 40,954 web citations were rendered accessible, of which 79 percent allowed easy and long‐term access to the authors' information intended in URLs. The decay rate for citations reveals an annual 5.2 percent increase. Long‐time inaccessibility to the authors' same 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 eight year half‐life was estimated for Iran's chemistry publications, which is rather promising in comparison with other fields of study.

The paper offers a quantitative analysis of the state of web citations application among chemistry researchers in Iran and voices concerns related to web citations in the publications in this field. The results of this study may be useful for providers of web contents, authors and editors in the field of chemistry publications.

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.