Regional Information Center for Science & Technology
Abstract
This article examines availability and half-life of URLs cited in articles published by Information Research journal. To do this, at first, we extracted all issues of Information Research from April 1995 to March 2008 and calculated number of all citations whether printed citations or Web ones. Afterwards, we checked availability of individual cited URLs. When we could not access directly URL inserted in any article by author(s), we tried to visit referred website. If this attempt seemed to be inadequate, search engine "Google" was employed to access the missing reference(s). Research findings indicated that 66% of articles have Web citations and rate of articles containing URL has increased from 17% in 1995 to 89% in 2008. Domains .net and .org have more stability and persistence compared to domains .edu, .gov, .uk and .com. Also, of 1761 cited URLs, 73% were accessible, and 27% were inaccessible. It is notable that using Google and searching missing URLs, accessible URLs increased from 73% to 86%. Finally, it was recommended that the best solution to prevent decay or disappearance of Web citations and diminish URLs decay is to make use of WebCite®-enhanced reference
