The life and death of URLs in five biomedical informatics journals.
OBJECTIVE
To determine the decay rate of Uniform Record Locators (URLs) in the reference section of biomedical informatics journals.


METHODS
URL references were collected from printed journal articles of the first and middle issues of 1999-2004 and electronically available in-press articles in January 2005. We limited this set to five biomedical informatics journals: Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, International Journal of Medical Informatics, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association: JAMIA, Methods of Information in Medicine, and Journal of Biomedical Informatics. During a 1-month period, URL access attempts were performed eight times a day at regular intervals.


RESULTS
Of the 19,108 references extracted from 606 printed and 86 in-press articles, 1112 (5.8%) references contained a URL. Of the 1049 unique URLs, 726 (69.2%) were alive, 230 (21.9%) were dead, and 93 (8.9%) were comatose. URLs from in-press articles included 212 URLs, of which 169 (79.7%) were alive, 21 (9.9%) were dead, and 22 (10.4%) were comatose. The average annual decay, or link rot, rate was 5.4%.


CONCLUSIONS
The URL decay rate in biomedical informatics journals is high. A commonly accepted strategy for the permanent archival of digital information referenced in scholarly publications is urgently needed.
Carnevale
Randy J
RJ
Department of Biomedical Informatics, Eskind Biomedical Library, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Vanderbilt University, 2209 Garland Avenue, Nashville, TN 37232-8340, USA.
Aronsky
Dominik
D
D015706:Bibliometrics; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000592:standards*; D008490:Medical Informatics; D010506:Periodicals as Topic; D011381:Programming Languages; D011643:Publishing; D014481:United States