Abstract:
To discover the current situation and characteristics of web citations
accessibility, the present study examined the accessibility of 4,253 web citations
in six key Iranian LIS journals published from 2006 to 2010. The proportion
percentage of web citations increased from 11% in 2006 to 30% in 2010. The
most widely cited top level domains in URLs include the .edu and .org with
respectively 37% and 23%. This study provides further evidence that
organizations websites have become increasingly vulnerable to URL decay. The
results show that only 3467 web citations remain accessible in 2011, of which
71% allowed easy and long-term access to the authors‟ information intended in
URLs. Long time inaccessibility to the authors‟ intended information was shown
to be mostly from URLs that returned the 404 error and also the URLs that had
gone through information update. An about 4 year half-life was estimated for
Iran‟s LIS Publications. Ultimately, the results suggest that the decay of URLs is
a grave problem in the publication of Iran‟s LIS researchers and cannot be
overlooked. These authors need to gain the necessary knowledge about using
web citations as major sources of information for their publications.
Machine summary:
Keywords: Web Citation, URL, Iran, Internet Resources Half-life, LIS journals.
Harter & Kim (1996) studied citations in 279 articles published in peer- reviewed LIS e-journals to measure the extent to which authors cite e-journals and other online sources.
Isfandyari Moghaddam & Saberi (2010) examined the accessibility and half-life of cited URLs in the published papers in the Information Research Journal.
Research Questions The purpose of this study is to add to the knowledge about the changing landscape of scholarly communications by examining citations to web resources included in articles published in the LIS.
In order to estimate half-life of web resources cited in LIS articles, the procedure used in previous research by Koehler (1999), Tyler & McNeil (2003), and Dimitrova & Bugeja (2007) has been employed.
This proves in LIS that attention to web resources in articles is significantly comparable with the reported findings from other researches (Isfandyari Moghaddam & Saberi, 2010; Wagner, Gebremichael, Taylor & Soltys, 2009; Aronsky, Madani, Carnevale, Duda & Feyder, 2007).
Subsequently, several approaches of preservation of web content published in scholarly journals have been proposed, whether as policies and procedures (Johnson, 2004; Schilling , 2004), or computationally such as software tools (Kahle, 1997; Eysenbach, 2005; Reich & Rosenthal, 2004; Schafer, 2001) and unique tagging/tracking measures like digital object identifiers (DOIs) (Caplan, 1998).
Availability and half-life of web references cited in information research journal: A citation study.