Breaking Down Link Rot: The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive’s Examination of URL Stability

Ms. Rhodes explores URL stability, measured by the prevalence of link rot over a three-year period, among the original URLs for law- and policy-related materials published to the web and archived though the Chesapeake Project, a collaborative digital preservation initiative under way in the law library community. The results demonstrate a significant increase in link rot over time in materials originally published to seemingly stable organization, government, and state web sites

Availability and Preservation of Scholarly Digital Resources

The dynamic, decentralized world-wide-web has become an essential part of scientific research and communication, representing a relatively new medium for the conveyance of scientific thought and discovery. Researchers create thousands of web sites every year to share software, data and services. Unlike books and journals, however, the preservation systems are not yet mature. This carries implications that go to the core of science: the ability to examine another\u27s sources to understand and reproduce their work. These valuable resources have been documented as disappearing over time in several subject areas. This dissertation examines the problem by performing a crossdisciplinary investigation, testing the effectiveness of existing remedies and introducing new ones. As part of the investigation, 14,489 unique web pages found in the abstracts within Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science citation index were accessed. The median lifespan of these web pages was found to be 9.3 years with 62% of them being archived. Survival analysis and logistic regression identified significant predictors of URL lifespan and included the year a URL was published, the number of times it was cited, its depth as well as its domain. Statistical analysis revealed biases in current static web-page solutions

A snapshot of 3649 Web-based services published between 1994 and 2017 shows a decrease in availability after 2 years

Background: The long-term availability of online Web services is of utmost importance to ensure reproducibility of analytical results. However, because of lack of maintenance following acceptance, many servers become unavailable after a short period of time. Our aim was to monitor the accessibility and the decay rate of published Web services as well as to determine the factors underlying trends changes. Methods: We searched PubMed to identify publications containing Web server-related terms published between 1994 and 2017. Automatic and manual screening was used to check the status of each Web service. Kruskall-Wallis, Mann-Whitney and Chi-square tests were used to evaluate various parameters, including availability, accessibility, platform, origin of authors, citation, journal impact factor and publication year. Results: We identified 3649 publications in 375 journals of which 2522 (69%) were currently active. Over 95% of sites were running in the first 2 years, but this rate dropped to 84% in the third year and gradually sank afterwards (P < 1e-16). The mean half-life of Web services is 10.39 years. Working Web services were published in journals with higher impact factors (P = 4.8e-04). Services published before the year 2000 received minimal attention. The citation of offline services was less than for those online (P = 0.022). The majority of Web services provide analytical tools, and the proportion of databases is slowly decreasing. Conclusions. Almost one-third of Web services published to date went out of service. We recommend continued support of Web-based services to increase the reproducibility of published results

Social media in scholarly communication : a review of the literature and empirical analysis of Twitter use by SSHRC doctoral award recipients

This report has been commissioned by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to analyze the role that social media currently plays in scholarly communication as well as to what extent metrics derived from social media activity related to scholarly content can be applied in an evaluation context. Scholarly communication has become more diverse and open with research being discussed, shared and evaluated online. Social media tools are increasingly being used in the research and scholarly communication context, as scholars connect on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter or specialized platforms such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu or Mendeley. Research is discussed on blogs or Twitter, while datasets, software code and presentations are shared on Dryad, Github, FigShare and similar websites for reproducibility and reuse. Literature is managed, annotated and shared with online tools such as Mendeley and Zotero, and peer review is starting to be more open and transparent. The changing landscape of scholarly communication has also brought about new possibilities regarding its evaluation. So-called altmetrics are based on scholarly social media activity and have been introduced to reflect scholarly output and impact beyond considering only peer-reviewed journal articles and citations within them to measure scientific success. This includes the measurement of more diverse types of scholarly work and various forms of impact including that on society. This report provides an overview of how various social media tools are used in the research context based on 1) an extensive review of the current literature as well as 2) an empirical analysis of the use of Twitter by the 2010 cohort of SSHRC Doctoral Award recipients was analyzed in depth. Twitter has been chosen as one of the most promising tools regarding interaction with the general public and scholarly communication beyond the scientific community. The report focuses on the opportunities and challenges of social media and derived metrics and attempts to provide SSHRC with information to develop guidelines regarding the use of social media by funded researchers as well support the informed used of social media metrics

Investigation of the Currency, Disappearance and Half-Life of Urls of Web Resources Cited In Iranian Researchers: A Comparative Study

This research was intended to comparatively investigate the currency, disappearance and half-life of URLs of web resources cited in Iranian researchers’ articles indexed in ISI in information science, psychology and management from 2009 to 2011. The research method was citation analysis. The statistical population of this research was all articles by Iranian researchers in psychology, information science and management from 2009 to 2011 which were indexed in SSCI. In order to extract bibliographic information of articles, ISI database was searched and the titles of the articles were extracted. After investigating the currency and disappearance of cited URLs and calculating the half-life of web resources, collected data were analyzed in accordance with research questions by means of Excel Software..

Health Misinformation in Search and Social Media

People increasingly rely on the Internet in order to search for and share health-related information. Indeed, searching for and sharing information about medical treatments are among the most frequent uses of online data. While this is a convenient and fast method to collect information, online sources may contain incorrect information that has the potential to cause harm, especially if people believe what they read without further research or professional medical advice. The goal of this thesis is to address the misinformation problem in two of the most commonly used online services: search engines and social media platforms. We examined how people use these platforms to search for and share health information. To achieve this, we designed controlled laboratory user studies and employed large-scale social media data analysis tools. The solutions proposed in this thesis can be used to build systems that better support people's health-related decisions. The techniques described in this thesis addressed online searching and social media sharing in the following manner. First, with respect to search engines, we aimed to determine the extent to which people can be influenced by search engine results when trying to learn about the efficacy of various medical treatments. We conducted a controlled laboratory study wherein we biased the search results towards either correct or incorrect information. We then asked participants to determine the efficacy of different medical treatments. Results showed that people were significantly influenced both positively and negatively by search results bias. More importantly, when the subjects were exposed to incorrect information, they made more incorrect decisions than when they had no interaction with the search results. Following from this work, we extended the study to gain insights into strategies people use during this decision-making process, via the think-aloud method. We found that, even with verbalization, people were strongly influenced by the search results bias. We also noted that people paid attention to what the majority states, authoritativeness, and content quality when evaluating online content. Understanding the effects of cognitive biases that can arise during online search is a complex undertaking because of the presence of unconscious biases (such as the search results ranking) that the think-aloud method fails to show. Moving to social media, we first proposed a solution to detect and track misinformation in social media. Using Zika as a case study, we developed a tool for tracking misinformation on Twitter. We collected 13 million tweets regarding the Zika outbreak and tracked rumors outlined by the World Health Organization and the Snopes fact-checking website. We incorporated health professionals, crowdsourcing, and machine learning to capture health-related rumors as well as clarification communications. In this way, we illustrated insights that the proposed tools provide into potentially harmful information on social media, allowing public health researchers and practitioners to respond with targeted and timely action. From identifying rumor-bearing tweets, we examined individuals on social media who are posting questionable health-related information, in particular those promoting cancer treatments that have been shown to be ineffective. Specifically, we studied 4,212 Twitter users who have posted about one of 139 ineffective ``treatments'' and compared them to a baseline of users generally interested in cancer. Considering features that capture user attributes, writing style, and sentiment, we built a classifier that is able to identify users prone to propagating such misinformation. This classifier achieved an accuracy of over 90%, providing a potential tool for public health officials to identify such individuals for preventive intervention

Tracking Sentiments toward Fat Acceptance over a Decade on Twitter

The fat acceptance (FA) movement aims to counteract weight stigma and discrimination against individuals who are overweight/obese. We developed a supervised neural network model to classify sentiment toward the FA movement in tweets and identify links between FA sentiment and various Twitter user characteristics. We collected any tweet containing either “fat acceptance” or “#fatacceptance” from 2010–2019 and obtained 48,974 unique tweets. We independently labeled 2000 of them and implemented/trained an Average stochastic gradient descent Weight-Dropped Long Short-Term Memory (AWD-LSTM) neural network that incorporates transfer learning from language modeling to automatically identify each tweet’s stance toward the FA movement. Our model achieved nearly 80% average precision and recall in classifying “supporting” and “opposing” tweets. Applying this model to the complete dataset, we observed that the majority of tweets at the beginning of the last decade supported FA, but sentiment trended downward until 2016, when support was at its lowest. Overall, public sentiment is negative across Twitter. Users who tweet more about FA or use FA-related hashtags are more supportive than general users. Our findings reveal both challenges to and strengths of the modern FA movement, with implications for those who wish to reduce societal weight stigma