خلاصة:
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.
ملخص الجهاز:
Availability and Half-life of Web References Cited in Information Research Journal: A Citation Study A.
ir Abstract This article examines availability and half-life of URLs cited in articles published by Information Research journal.
Internet Research, Citation, Citation Analysis, Web Citation, Resources Half-time, URL Internet Introduction Since the quasi-miraculous emergence of the Web in 1990s, there has been a continuous increase in the volume of scholarly resources in electronic form, such as e- books, e-journals, e-databases, e-theses and dissertations, e-prints of research papers, and the like.
Research Objectives The main aim of the present paper is to study and analyze Web citations of the scholarly articles published in Information Research during April 1995 to March 2008.
Harter and Kim (1996) in an article entitled "Electronic journals and scholarly communication: a citation and reference study" done one of the first studies on availability and permanency of URLs. The major purpose of their research was to study the effects of scholarly, peer-reviewed e-journals on formal scholarly and scientific communication, as measured by cited references.
Casserly and Bird (2003) examined 500 internet citations randomly chosen from scholarly articles published in library and information science journals.
So, building this research on previous works mentioned above and using a single case study approach, this article aims to explore availability and half-life of URLs cited in articles published by Information Research journal.
Composition of bibliographic citations According to Figure 2, of total citations (10242), citing to Web and printed resources in Information Research articles is 1761 (l7'7o) and 8481 (83to), respectively.