Carmine Sellitto, Lecturer, School of Information Systems, Victoria University, Melbourne, 8001. Email: carmine.sellitto@vu.edu.au
Web-located citations, resource permanency, HTTP404 error message.
The advent of the Web has seen an increasing incidence of writers citing online documents in their publications- a feature that some have argued as being invalid due to the ephemeral and transient nature of Web pages. This paper reports on a study that examined the citation of Web-located bibliographical references in academic articles. After evaluating over two thousand references it was found that nearly 50% of all citations used in papers referred to a Web-located resource. Moreover, a relatively high proportion of all these Web references were invalid, not being able to be found at the author-specified URL. The major reason for invalid or missing Web citations was the commonly encountered HTTP404 message, followed by server time-out and bad host error messages. The .edu was the domain associated with with the greatest number of missing citations.
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