The missing link: Assessing the reliability of internet citations in history journals

Technology and Culture

Volumn 49, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 420-429

  Russell, Edmund ^a   Kane, Jennifer ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA   (United States)

^b NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 44349167677     PISSN: 0040165X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tech.0.0028     Document Type: Review

References (26)

1. Robert P. Dellavalle et al., "Going, Going, Gone: Lost Internet References," Science 302 (31 October 2003): 787-88;
2. Renee Crichlow and Nicole Winbush, "Accessibility and Accuracy of Web Page References in 5 Major Medical Journals," JAMA 292 (2004): 2723-24;
3. Eric J. Hester et al., "Internet Citations in Oncology Journals: A Vanishing Resource?" Journal of the National Cancer Institute 96 (2004): 969-71;
4. Victoria Reich and David Rosenthal, "Preserving Today's Scientific Record for Tomorrow," British Medical Journal 328 (2004): 61-62;
5. Evangelos Evangelou, Thomas A. Trikalinos, and John P. A. Ionnidis, "Unavailability of Online Supplementary Scientific Information from Articles Published in Major Journals," FASEB Journal 19 (2005): 1943-44;
6. Carmine Sellitto, "The Impact of Impermanent Web-Located Citations: A Study of 123 Scholarly Conference Publications," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 56 (2005): 695-703.
7. As far as we could determine, no humanities or social science journal has published an article quantifying the rate of link decay within its field. Fred O'Bryant and Kathryn Soule, librarians at the University of Virginia, searched databases for us using the following terms: link rot, persistence and URL, permanence and URL, web-site links, and web sites/maintenance. The databases were Historical Abstracts, MLA Bibliography, Web of Science (including the Social Sciences and Arts/Humanities components), and Education Full Text. In Web of Science, they also did a citation search for Dellavalle et al., "Going, Going, Gone," for all disciplines.
8. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 23, 30;
9. Chuck Zerby, The Devil's Details: A History of Footnotes (New York, 2002).
10. Grafton, 4, 220, 225.
11. Citation methods varied, but the University of Chicago Press standardized the system historians have come to use most frequently (University of Chicago Press, The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. [Chicago, 2003]);
12. see also Martha Howell and Walter Preventer, From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods (Ithaca, N.Y, 2001).
13. Roy Rosenzweig, "The Road to Xanadu: Public and Private Pathways on the History Web," Journal of American History 88 (2001): 548-79.
14. Stephen Robertson, "Doing History in Hypertext," Journal of the Association for History and Computing 7 (August 2004) (n.p.), http://mcel.pacificu.edu/jahc/JAHCVII2/ARTICLES/robertson/robertson.html (accessed 1 May 2006). We are aware of the irony of citing web sources in our research note and have filed hard copies of all cited documents.
15. Deborah Lines Anderson, "Benchmarks: Controlling Digital Data," Journal of the Association for History and Computing 6 (April 2003) (n.p.), http://mcel.pacificu.edu/jahc/JAHCVI1/benchmarks.HTML (accessed 1 May 2006).
16. Rosenzweig, "The Road to Xanadu."
17. Roy Rosenzweig, "Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era," American Historical Review 108 (2003): 735-62.
18. Suzanne R. Graham, "Historians and Electronic Resources: Patterns and Use," Journal of the Association for History and Computing 5 (September 2002) (n.p.), http://mcel.pacificu.edu/JAHC/JAHCV2/ARTICLES/graham/ graham.html (accessed 3 May 2006). The question was posed in the negative, with 46 percent of historians disagreeing with the statement that internet resources lack adequate permanence to be cited.
19. Philip M. Davis and Suzanne A. Cohen, "The Effect of the Web on Undergraduate Citation Behavior, 1996-1999," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 52 (2001): 309-14.
20. For American Historical Review, the issues spanned volume 104, issue 3 (June 1999) through volume 11, issue 1 (February 2006).
21. For Journal of American History, coverage extended from volume 86, issue 1 (June 1999) through volume 92, issue 4 (March 2006). All issues are available at the History Cooperative, http://www.historycooperative.org (accessed 12-18 April 2006).
22. A number of cited sources charge users for subscriptions or for individual articles. Examples include all or parts of Project Muse, History Cooperative, JSTOR, www.nytimes.com, www.theweeklystandard.com, and www.washingtonpost.com. We counted these links as active because, although not free, the information was available.
23. 2 was 0.44, which told us that our simplified model "explained" 44 percent of the pattern in the data. We seem to have identified an important, but not the only, variable in predicting the rate at which links decayed. Still, knowing what causes 44 percent of the rate at which links decay could be useful information. So, given our data, how confidently can we say that links decay with time? Statistics provide a way to answer that question. Statistics never prove that something is true, since it is always possible that chance (in other words, all the variables other than the one we are studying) caused a pattern. Instead, statistics tells us how often we would expect a pattern if chance alone were at work. If the pattern is extremely unlikely, our confidence increases that our hypothesis is true and we call the result statistically significant. By convention, scientists use 5 percent as the cutoff for significance; that is, if chance alone would have created our pattern five or fewer times out of 100, we have enough confidence that our hypothesis is correct to consider the result significant. With Excel, we calculated that chance alone would have created the pattern in our data (showing that links decayed over time) 7 percent of the time. Because that is more than 5 percent, we call it statistically insignificant - but it is not far from 5 percent, so we consider the result strongly suggestive.
24. The archive's website describes itself this way: "The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections." The Internet Archive, "About the Internet Archive," http://www.archive.org/about/about.php (accessed 22 June 2007).
25. The Internet Archive, "About the Internet Archive," http://www.archive.org/about/faqs.php#5 (accessed 22 June 2007);
26. Internet Archive, "Frequently Asked Questions," http://web.archive.org/collections/web/faqs.html#exclusions (accessed 22 June 2007).