Subject: [urn] Reference rot paper

From: Juha Hakala <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 08:09:08 +0200

Hello,

Herbert Van de Sompel et al. have published a paper which investigates 
the reference rot problem in STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) 
articles:

Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot
Klein M, Van de Sompel H, Sanderson R, Shankar H, Balakireva L, et al.
(2014) Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from
Reference Rot.PLoS ONE 9(12): e115253.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115253

This is not the first scientific analysis of the actual life span of 
HTTP URIs, but IMO it is the most thorough one so far. The results are 
alarming: when considering only those STM articles that contain 
references to Web resources, seven out of ten articles suffer from 
reference rot. The authors suggest that in order to safeguard the 
long-term integrity of the web-based scholarly record, robust solutions 
to to combat the reference rot problem are required.

Juha

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  Juha Hakala
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