The Impact of Impermanent Web-Located Citations: A Study of Scholarly Conference Publications

Sellitto, Carmine ORCID: 0000-0001-6119-9242 (2005) The Impact of Impermanent Web-Located Citations: A Study of Scholarly Conference Publications. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 56 (7). pp. 695-703. ISSN 1532-2882

Abstract

This paper reports on research that examined the viable nature of 1068 Web-located citations in 123 academic conference papers published between 1995 and 2003. The study appears to be one of the few but increasing number of investigations that examines the growing practice of authors citing URLs in their publications to support and argue their scholarly research. The research found that some 46% of all citations to Web-located sources could not be accessed- with the HTTP 404 message (61.5%) being the greatest cause of missing citations. Collectively, the missing citations accounted for 22.0% of all citations, which represents a significant reduction in the theoretical knowledge base underpinning many scholarly articles. Furthermore, this paper argues that the consequences of disappearing Web-located citations has led to diminished opportunities for future researchers to examination the underlaying foundations of discourse and argument in scholarly articles.

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Item type Article
URI https://vuir.vu.edu.au/id/eprint/336
DOI 10.1002/asi.20159
Official URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/asi.20159
Subjects Historical > RFCD Classification > 280000 Information, Computing and Communication Sciences
Historical > FOR Classification > 0807 Library and Information Studies
Historical > Faculty/School/Research Centre/Department > School of Management and Information Systems
Keywords impermanent, web-located citations, URLs, HTTP 404 message, missing citations
Citations in Scopus 38 - View on Scopus
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