The impact of impermanent Web-located citations: A study of 123 scholarly conference publications

This paper reports on research that examined the viable nature of 1068 Web-located citations in 123 academic conference papers published between 1995 and 2003. The study appears to be one of the few but increasing number of investigations that examines the growing practice of authors citing URLs in their publications to support and argue their scholarly research. The research found that some 46% of all citations to Web-located sources could not be accessed— with the HTTP 404 message (61.5%) being the greatest cause of missing citations. Collectively, the missing citations accounted for 22.0% of all citations, which represents a significant reduction in the theoretical knowledge base underpinning many scholarly articles. Furthermore, this paper argues that the consequences of disappearing Web-located citations has led to diminished opportunities for future researchers to examination the underlaying foundations of discourse and argument in scholarly articles. INTRODUCTION The Web has become the preferred medium for delivering business and organisational information to its constituency, allowing information to be effectively collated and presented in a useful form. The powerful publishing features of the Web are evident in the informational models that have been proposed by the general information systems and information science literature (Davenport 1997; O'Brien 2001; Turban et al. 2002). According to early work by Nunberg (1996), the migration of digital publications to the Web environment has resulted in enhanced information