Abstract

1. Maintaining persistent scholarship: An analysis of the accessibility rates of cited URLs in doctoral dissertations Carol Anne Germain University at Albany Libraries, State University of New York Results – Dissertations with at Least One URL Citation within Academic Group Literature Review (Select) Abstract Results – Dissertations with at Least One URL Citation Citation is a highly valued practice in the academic community. This mechanism supports an author’s ideas, theories, and research; it acknowledges the scholarly contributions of others; and integrates academic works to enrich scholarly communication. Well-constructed citations, in addition to providing the appropriate bibliographic information needed to retrieve a supporting document, acknowledge the contribution of previous literature to the topic and create important links between the citing and cited sources which often have similar contents. The development of the World Wide Web has generated the use of digitally-based citations. Web pages can be volatile and are often not static publications, so when an author cites a URL resource there is a risk that it may vanish and thus the cited work is lost. Of particular interest are citation strategies of doctoral students who are developing their research protocols. This study analyzed the patterns of freestanding URL citations found in University at Albany dissertations between 1996 and 2007. Three distinct years of dissertation citations (2000, 2003, 2006) were tested for accessibility and content accuracy. Each URL was searched using a URL Web browser (Firefox), the search engine Google, and two Web archival tools, the Internet Archive and WebCite. The findings of this study indicate that the use of URL citations in dissertations is increasing over time. After testing the URL citations using the four information retrieval tools, the results showed that 42% of Humanities, 61% of Science, and 63% of Social Science citations could be located in at least one of the tools. This research contributes data on the changing nature of scholarly attribution across disciplines, empirically documents the rising use of online citations in scholarly works, and highlights the need to increase discussions about citation policies across academic disciplines if citations are to continue over time as the means of acknowledging the work of others and providing intellectual context to new research. Bugeja, M., & Dimitrova, D.V. (2005a). Exploring the half-life of Internet footnotes. Iowa Journal of Communication, 37 (1), 77-86. Bugeja, M., & Dimitrova, D. (2009). Vanishing act: The erosion of online footnotes and implications for scholarship in the digital age. Duluth, MN: Library Juice press. Casserly, M., & Bird, J.E. (2008). Web citation availability: A follow-up study. Library Resources & Technical Services, 52(1), 42-53. Germain, C. A. (2000). URLs: Uniform resource locators or unreliable reliable resource locators? College and Research Libraries, 61 (4), 359-365. Germain, C.A. (2012). Maintaining persistent scholarship: The case of University at Albany dissertations. (Doctoral dissertation). University at Albany, Albany, NY. Koehler, W. (1999). An analysis of Web page and Web site constancy and permanence. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50 (2), 162-180. Wagner, C., Gebremichael, M., Taylor, M., & Soltys, M. (2009). Disappearing act: Decay of uniform resource locators in health care management journals. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 97(2), 122-130. Results – Internet Archive Results – Google Searches Results – Web Browser Search Number and Percentage of Accessible URL Citations via Web Browser Search by Academic Group across Study Years (2000, 2003, 2006) Number and Percentage of Accessible URL Citations via Google Searches by Academic Group across Study Years (2000, 2003, 2006) Number and Percentage of URL Citations Accessible via the Internet Archive by Academic Group across Study Years (2000, 2003, 2006) Research Questions • This study looked at several issues relating to the persistence of Internet sources cited in dissertations. Its intent was to answer the following primary research questions: • What general trends are present in Web citations referenced in doctoral dissertations at the University at Albany (e.g., proportion of URL citations/to total citations; URL citations per academic group (discipline))? • What relationship, if any, exists between disciplines and the rate of accessibility for University at Albany URL dissertation citations using a Web browser access tools (e.g., Firefox)? • Does the passage of time affect the accessibility rate of online citations, and does this vary across disciplines? • What is the rate of accessibility for cited resources using the Internet search engine Google, and two Web archival tools, the Internet Archive and WebCite? • Are there differences between the content accuracy of the accessed results of the four retrieval tools (Web browser search, Google, Internet Archive and WebCite) and the bibliographic information in the dissertation citation? Rate of Accessibility and Content Accuracy of URL Citations via the Internet Archive by Academic Group across Study Years (2000, 2003, 2006) Rate of Accessibility and Content Accuracy of URL Citations via Google by Academic Group across Study Years (2000, 2003, 2006) Rate of Accessibility and Content Accuracy via Web Browser Search by Study Years (2000, 2003, 2006) and Academic Group The WebCite searches retrieved less than 2% of URL citations. This can be explained by its short existence (2005)