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Title: Scholarly context not found: One in five articles suffers from reference rot

Journal Article · · PLoS ONE
 [1];  [1];  [1];  [1];  [1];  [2];  [2];  [3]
  1. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
  2. The Univ. of Edinburgh, Scotland (United Kingdom)
  3. Bar-llan Univ., (Israel)
+ Show Author Affiliations

The emergence of the web has fundamentally affected most aspects of information communication, including scholarly communication. The immediacy that characterizes publishing information to the web, as well as accessing it, allows for a dramatic increase in the speed of dissemination of scholarly knowledge. But, the transition from a paper-based to a web-based scholarly communication system also poses challenges. In this paper, we focus on reference rot, the combination of link rot and content drift to which references to web resources included in Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM) articles are subject. We investigate the extent to which reference rot impacts the ability to revisit the web context that surrounds STM articles some time after their publication. We do so on the basis of a vast collection of articles from three corpora that span publication years 1997 to 2012. For over one million references to web resources extracted from over 3.5 million articles, we determine whether the HTTP URI is still responsive on the live web and whether web archives contain an archived snapshot representative of the state the referenced resource had at the time it was referenced. We observe that the fraction of articles containing references to web resources is growing steadily over time. We find one out of five STM articles suffering from reference rot, meaning it is impossible to revisit the web context that surrounds them some time after their publication. When only considering STM articles that contain references to web resources, this fraction increases to seven out of ten.

Research Organization:
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
OSTI ID:
1201464
Journal Information:
PLoS ONE, Vol. 9, Issue 12; ISSN 1932-6203
Publisher:
Public Library of ScienceCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 57 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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The Dat Project, an open and decentralized research data tool journal October 2018
An open source web application for distributed geospatial data exploration journal February 2019
New Forms of Scholarship and a Serials (R)evolution journal July 2015
Qualitative Data Sharing: Data Repositories and Academic Libraries as Key Partners in Addressing Challenges journal June 2018
Bioboxes: standardised containers for interchangeable bioinformatics software journal October 2015
Identifying PIDs playing FAIR journal November 2019
“As-You-Go” Instead of “After-the-Fact”: A Network Approach to Scholarly Communication and Evaluation journal April 2018
Verified, Shared, Modular, and Provenance Based Research Communication with the Dat Protocol journal June 2019
Cool DOI's text January 2016
Qualitative Data Sharing: Data Repositories and Academic Libraries as Key Partners in Addressing Challenges posted_content January 2018
"As-you-go" instead of "after-the-fact": A network approach to scholarly communication and evaluation posted_content January 2018
"As-you-go" instead of "after-the-fact": A network approach to scholarly communication and evaluation posted_content March 2018
Qualitative Data Sharing: Data Repositories and Academic Libraries as Key Partners in Addressing Challenges text January 2017
The Cochrane Collaboration: institutional analysis of a knowledge commons journal February 2018
Identifiers for the 21st century: How to design, provision, and reuse persistent identifiers to maximize utility and impact of life science data journal June 2017
Scholarly Context Adrift: Three out of Four URI References Lead to Changed Content journal December 2016

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