title: Prevalence and inaccessibility of URLs in the biomedical literature.
abstract: The World Wide Web is a dynamic environment that does not guarantee permanent access or content stability. We determined the prevalence of URLs in forthcoming, biomedical papers when they are first released in MEDLINE(R) and prospectively evaluated the rate of inaccessible URLs during a 19-day period. Among 96,153 references from 2,614 forthcoming papers (739 journals) the prevalence of URLs was 0.59%. The rate of inaccessible URLs was 12.4% when first available to the public community.
authors.affiliation: Dept. of Biomedical Informatics, Emergency Medicine,Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA.
authors.forename: Sina
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Madani
authors.forename: Randy J
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: Carnevale
authors.forename: Stephany
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Duda
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Feyder
authors.forename: Dominik
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Aronsky
mesh_terms: D015706:Bibliometrics; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D020407:Internet; D046609:Libraries, Digital; D016239:MEDLINE; D010506:Periodicals as Topic