[Irtalk] The trouble with reference rot : Nature News & Comment

[Hilton Gibson]

*The scholarly literature is meant to be a permanent record of science. So
it is an embarrassing state of affairs that many of the web references in
research papers are broken*: click on them, and there's a fair chance they
will point nowhere or to a site that may have altered since the paper
referred to it.

Herbert Van de Sompel, an information scientist at the Los Alamos National
Laboratory Research Library in New Mexico, quantified the alarming extent
of this 'link rot' and 'content drift' (together, 'reference rot') in a
paper published last December (M. Klein et al. PLoS ONE 9, e115253; 2014).
With a group of researchers under the auspices of the Hiberlink project (
http://hiberlink.org), he analysed more than 1 million 'web-at-large' links
(defined as those beginning with 'http://' that point to sites other than
research articles) in some 3.5 million articles published between 1997 and
2012. The Hiberlink team found that in articles from 2012,* 13% of
hyperlinks in arXiv papers and 22% of hyperlinks in papers from Elsevier
journals were rotten (the proportion rises in older articles), and overall
some 75% of links were not cached on any Internet archiving site within two
weeks of the article's publication date*, meaning their content might no
longer reflect the citing author's original intent — although the reader
may not know this.

http://www.nature.com/news/the-trouble-with-reference-rot-1.17465
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