Bringing life to dead: Role of Wayback Machine in retrieving vanished URLs
Abstract
The paper makes an attempt to examine the decay and half-life of URL citations cited in articles of conference proceedings. The main focus of the paper is to explore the possibilities of recovering inactive URL citations through the Wayback Machine. The study collected a total of 5698 URLs cited in the 1700 articles published in three Indian LIS conference proceedings published during 2001–2010. Results of the study show that only 49.91% (2844 out of 5698) of URL citations remained active whereas the remaining 2854 (50.09%) were found to have vanished. The paper argues that, as the age of URLs increases, the disappearance of URL citations also increases (r = 0.861, p = 0.003). The study also found that there was an increase in the percentage of active URLs from 2844 (49.91%) to 4506 (79.08%) after the recovery of vanished URLs through the Wayback Machine. The average half-life of URLs before the recovery of vanished URLs and after the recovery of vanished URLs was 4.94 and 14.99 years, respectively (t = −6.720, d.f. = 9, p = 0.000).
Get full access to this article
View all access and purchase options for this article.
References
1. Falagas ME, Karveli EA, Tritsaroli VI. The risk of using the Internet as reference resource: A comparative study. International Journal of Medical Informatics 2008; 77: 280–286.
2. Goh DHL, Ng PK. Link decay in leading information science journals. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 2007; 58: 15–24.
3. Germain CA. URLs: Uniform resource locators or unreliable reliable resource locators? College and Research Libraries 2000; 61: 359–365.
4. Dimitrova DV, Bugeja M. Raising the dead: Recovery of decayed online citations. American Communication Journal Summer 2007; 9.
5. Wagner C, Gebremichael MD, Taylor M. Disappearing act: Decay of uniform resource locators in health care management journals. Journal of Medical Library Association 2009; 97: 122–130.
6. Casserly MF, Bird JE. Web citation availability: analysis and implications for scholarship. College and Research Libraries 2003; 64: 300–317.
7. Wren JD, Johnson KR, Crockett DM, Heilig LF, Schilling LM, Dellavalle RP. Uniform resource locator decay in dermatology journals: author attitudes and preservation practices. Archives of Dermatology 2006; 142: 1147–1152.
8. Russell E, Kane J. The missing link: Assessing the reliability of internet citations in history journals. Technology and Culture 2008; 49: 420–429.
9. Sadat-Moosavi A, Isfandyari-Moghaddam A, Tajeddini O. Accessibility of online resources cited in scholarly LIS journals: A study of Emerald ISI-ranked journals. Aslib Proceedings 2012; 64: 178–192.
10. Kumar Sampath, Kumar Vinay. HTTP 404-page (not) found: Recovery of decayed URL citations. Journal of Informetrics 2013; 7: 145–157.
11. Wren JD. URL decay in MEDLINE – a 4-year follow-up study. Bioinformatics 2008; 24: 1381–1385.
12. Duda JJ, Camp RJ. Ecology in the information age: patterns of use and attrition rates of internet-based citations in ESA journals 1997–2005. Frontiers in Ecology and Environment 2008; 6: 145–151.
13. Wu Z. An empirical study of the accessibility of web references in two Chinese academic journals. Scientometrics 2009; 78: 481–503.
14. Isfandyari-Moghaddam A, Saberi MK, Mohammad Esmaeel S. Availability and half-life of web references cited in Information research journal: A citation study. International Journals of Information Science Management 2010; 8: 57–75.
15. Tajeddini O, Azimi A, Sadat-Moosavi A, Sharif-Moghaddam H. Death of web citations: A serious alarm for authors. Malaysian Journal of Library and Information Science 2011; 16: 17–29.
16. Saberi MK, Isfandyari-Moghaddam A, Mohamadesmaeil S. Web citations analysis of the JASSS: The first ten years. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 2011; 14: 22.
17. Saberi MK, Abed H. Accessibility and decay of web citations in five open access ISI journals. Internet Research 2012; 22: 234–247.
18. Mariam J, Yaghoub N, Alireza I-M. Analyzing web citations availability and half-life in medical journals: A case study in an Iranian university. Aslib Proceedings: New Information Perspectives 2013; 65: 242–261.
19. Zhang Y. Scholarly use of internet-based electronic resources. Journal of American Society for Information Science and Technology 2001; 52: 628–654.
20. Spinellis D. The decay and failures of Web references. Communications of the ACM 2003; 46: 71–78.
21. Rumsey M. Runaway train: Problems of permanence, accessibility, and stability in the use of Web sources in law review citations. Law Library Journal 2002; 94: 27–39.
22. Koehler W. An analysis of web page and web site, constancy and permanence. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 1999; 50: 162–180.
23. Tyler D, McNeil B. Librarians and link rot: A comparative analysis with some methodological considerations. Portal: Libraries and the Academy 2003; 3: 615–632.
24. Aronsky D, Madani S, Carnevale RJ, Duda S, Feyder MT. The prevalence and inaccessibility of internet references in the biomedical literature at the time of publication. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 2007; 14: 232–234.
Cite article
Cite article
Cite article
OR
Download to reference manager
If you have citation software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice
Information, rights and permissions
Information
Published In
Article first published online: October 21, 2014
Issue published: February 2015
Keywords
Authors
Metrics and citations
Metrics
Journals metrics
This article was published in Journal of Information Science.
VIEW ALL JOURNAL METRICSArticle usage*
Total views and downloads: 498
*Article usage tracking started in December 2016
Altmetric
See the impact this article is making through the number of times it’s been read, and the Altmetric Score.
Learn more about the Altmetric Scores
Articles citing this one
Receive email alerts when this article is cited
Web of Science: 6 view articles Opens in new tab
Crossref: 0
- Giving life to dead: role of WayBack Machine in recovery of dead URLs
- Sustainable development and stakeholder engagement in the agri‐food se...
- Web archiving of indigenous knowledge systems in South Africa
- Rotten web citations cited in scholarly journals: use of time travel f...
- The Wayback Machine: notes on a re-enchantment
- Web citation analysis of Library and Information Science and Communica...
- Open Educational Resources and Prior Learning Assessment
Figures and tables
Figures & Media
Tables
View Options
Get access
Access options
If you have access to journal content via a personal subscription, university, library, employer or society, select from the options below:
loading institutional access options
CILIP members can access this journal content using society membership credentials.
CILIP members can access this journal content using society membership credentials.
Alternatively, view purchase options below:
Purchase 24 hour online access to view and download content.
Access journal content via a DeepDyve subscription or find out more about this option.
