Michael Bugeja was fact-checking his references for his most recent book when he ran into a problem. The director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University, found that 30 percent of his online citations no longer worked correctly.
This prompted Bugeja and Iowa State Assistant Professor Daniela Dimitrova to conduct a study researching the decay -- or disappearance -- of online citations.
"It's all over the place and it affects every discipline," Bugeja said, mentioning that their study is "the first one to sound the alarm on the far reaching ramifications."
Bugeja and Dimitrova found more than 33 percent of online footnotes had disappeared within a four-year period among scholarly journals in journalism and communication.
The issue of online references is particularly relevant with the advent of Google Scholar -- an ambitious project to digitize thousands of books that was announced earlier this year.
Bugeja explains that the current system of citations in academia is based on the printing press and books: while changing or manipulating a book is a crime, it is incredibly easy -- and acceptable -- to manipulate texts on the Internet.
For instance, he said, by changing the font size in an Internet document, the pagination likely changes as well -- rendering an old citation obsolete.
The study found that government sites (.gov) were the most reliable, followed by organizations (.org), and lastly commercial sites (.com).
Calling the book "the ultimate fire-walled medium," Bugeja called on the university library community in the United States to seriously examine this problem.
Administrators at Van Pelt library have already taken numerous steps to counteract the ephemeral quality of URLs.
The library is pioneering PennText -- a system that digitizes online journals to make them available permanently to students. PennText already has 16,000 to 17,000 journals in their system.
In addition, the online research community has created "Digital Object Identifiers." According to DOI.org, a DOI is a "bar code for intellectual property" and ensures that a registered URL will permanently exist.
"By registering as a vendor you are saying for all time this link will go somewhere meaningful, " said Michael Winkler, director of information technologies for Van Pelt.
Despite such innovations, Bugeja maintains that old-fashioned research materials are more reliable.
"Sometimes we should take the steps to the library and pull out the books from the stacks," Bugeja said.
The expiration of Web sites can be particularly problematic if the research is in the medical or scientific field.
"How do you replicate or verify a study if you can't rely on the footnotes?" Bugeja asked.
Bugeja and Dimitrova will present their study on May 29 to the 55th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association in New York.
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