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March 15, 2005
Scholarly link rot
If I can access this, this may make me happy.
STUDY SHOWS ONLINE CITATIONS DON'T AGE WELL A study conducted by two academics at Iowa State University has shown a remarkably high rate of "decay" for online citations. Michael Bugeja, professor of journalism and communication, and Daniela Dimitrova, assistant professor of communication, looked at five prestigious communication-studies journals from 2000 to 2003 and found 1,126 footnotes that cite online resources. Of those, 373 did not work at all, a decay rate of 33 percent; of those that worked, only 424 took users to information relevant to the citation. In one of the journals in the study, 167 of 265 citations did not work. Bugeja compared the current situation to that of Shakespearean plays in the early days of printing, when many copies of plays were fraught with errors due to the instability of the printing medium. Anthony T. Grafton, a professor of history at Princeton University and author of a book on footnotes, agreed that citation decay is a real and growing problem, describing the situation as "a world in which documentation and verification melt into air." Chronicle of Higher Education, 14 March 2005 (sub. req'd)
Why does this make me happy? Because I wrote about this a year ago:
it also makes me wonder about scholarship. If I understand the point of citation, it's not only for validation (i.e. I'm not making this stuff up), it's also for accessibility. Just like scientific results have the requirement of reproducible results in order to be consider valid, scholarship requires that we are able to go beyond the piece in hand to read and evaluate what influenced it, whether the evidence offered is in proper context, etc.
Of course, there are many organizations that are working very hard to keep potentially ephemeral resources available to generations of scholars. But there's going to be a lot of material that may be of interest and relevance to you and your research, but may not be accessible to your audience by the time they read your research.
This begs, to me, two sets of questions:
1) Are we going to find a way to cite dead or inaccessible sources? Is the situation with lost electronic resources analogous to rare, out-of-print or non-published manuscripts and other works? Does the scholar say to his audience, "I saw this, I evaluated/critiqued it correctly, this citation was correct at the time it was generated, you have to trust me on this?"
It's not like they took my advice or anything, but it's nice to know it wasn't simply idle chatter ...
Posted by misseli at March 15, 2005 02:07 PM
Comments
Scholars Note 'Decay' of Citations to Online References
By SCOTT CARLSON
Michael Bugeja says that when he got his doctorate in English, he studied the difference between "fair" and "foul" copies of Shakespeare's plays -- a foul copy being rife with inaccuracies.
"That's because the medium of printing was unstable back then," says Mr. Bugeja, a professor of journalism and communication at Iowa State University.
Now that the Internet is the new unstable publishing medium, he and a colleague have studied how Web links stop working, or "decay," as those sites change addresses or shut down. They focused on links used by scholars in footnotes that cite Web materials.
After analyzing more than 1,126 citations that make reference to Web addresses, taken from online versions of five prestigious communication-studies journals, 373 of the links, or 33 percent, were found to be dead. Of the 753 of the links that worked, only 424 pointed to information pertinent to the citation.
Mr. Bugeja and Daniela Dimitrova, an assistant professor of communication at Iowa State, looked at footnotes from 2000 to 2003 in Human Communication Research, the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, the Journal of Communication, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, and New Media & Society.
"The erosion of footnotes," Mr. Bugeja says, "might put us back to a curious situation, wondering whether we have a fair copy of a journal article or a foul copy of a journal article."
In some journals, the decay rate was particularly high. For example, of the 265 citations in New Media & Society articles that included links, 167 did not work.
Steve Jones, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago who is an editor of "New Media & Society," called the decay of online citations "a real issue" that the journal has begun to examine.
He wonders whether copyright law might someday allow scholars to copy and archive online articles that they used as sources. But he says such a solution is "pie in the sky."
Anthony T. Grafton, a professor of history at Princeton University who has written a book about footnotes, has read a draft of the study and agrees that citation decay is "a real problem."
"I'm looking at a world in which documentation and verification melt into air," he says. He sees this problem growing, as today's students rely more on online sources. "My students come to college less and less able to negotiate a book landscape and more and more adept at negotiating the Web."
Mr. Bugeja and Ms. Dimitrova are preparing their findings for publication and are coming up with a list of recommendations to stop the decay of online citations. Their findings and recommendations will be presented at the International Communication Association conference in May.
Section: Information Technology
Volume 51, Issue 28, Page A30
Posted by: Anonymous at March 15, 2005 03:56 PM
Heavens to Betsy ... thank you, whoever you are ...
Posted by: Eli at March 15, 2005 11:18 PM
You are welcome. :-) It was easy!
Posted by: Anonymous at March 16, 2005 01:41 PM