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Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot.

posted by martyb on Thursday January 29 2015, @07:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the someone-should-create-an-internet-archive dept.

AnonTechie writes:

While the immediacy of publishing information on the Internet dramatically speeds the dissemination of scholarly knowledge, the transition from a paper-based to a web-based scholarly communication system has introduced challenges that Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists are seeking to address.

"For more than 70 percent of papers that link to web pages, revisiting the originally referenced web content proved impossible," said Herbert Van de Sompel, of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library. "These results are alarming because vanishing references undermine the long-term integrity of the scholarly record."

http://phys.org/news/2015-01-online-scholarly-articles-affected.html

[Article]: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0115253

 
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  • (Score: 2) by morgauxo on Thursday January 29 2015, @02:25PM

    by morgauxo (2082) on Thursday January 29 2015, @02:25PM (#139168)

    For some reason I can't cut and paste the quote but the article says that other studies have shown that searching the Internet Archive and Google cache they were able to reduce the number of lost links from 36% down to just 5% when looking at a group of papers from 2006-2008.

    The article then goes on to state (if I understant their big words correctly) that this is not a solution because they aren't necessarily seeing the linked page as it was from the same time as the author linked to it. It may be different. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me because internetarchive.org has a great calendar view where you can see all the times that they archived a page and chose the one closest to the date you need. I don't know about these 'scholarly writings' but I use it all the time for 'dead link' maker type project articles and can almost always find at least one date something was archived where it contains the content I am looking for. It isn't always the latest date, sometimes I do have to look for a date close to when the link was made. And.. usually it's there!

    What surprises me is that they find the articles archived at all. Isn't most of that stuff behind paywalls?

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