Anina Bauer and Đilda Pečarić Department of Information and Communication Sciences Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb Croatia Zagreb, th International Conference The Future of Information Sciences (INFuture) Zagreb, 6-8 November 2013

 An increasing amount of students and scholars use web references as a prime source in their papers  The main concern : ◦ web references have a short lifespan  Web references disappear within two or three years since they have been placed online ◦ Even not knowing the exact date of their removal from the Internet complicates the calculation of the average lifespan 2

 Some of the reasons why the web references tend to disappear has to do with: ◦ the absence of a universal definition of web references (Halpin, H., 2011)  URI (Uniform Resource Identifier)  URL (Uniform Resource Locator)  URN (Uniform Resource Name)  or is a completely new system of identifying in order. ◦ disparity in the division of types of web references (Meyer zu Eissen, S.; Stein, B., 2004; Santini, M., 2007) ◦ inability to, accurately, estimate their lifespan (Ashenfelder, M., 2011) 3

 short lifespan of web references were noticed in: ◦ Research of graduate papers done at the Department of Information Sciences at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb:  Bauer, A.; Kirin, M.; Turković, M. Web References in Graduate Papers at the Department of Information Sciences at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. // INFuture2011 – Information Sciences and e-Society”/ Billenness, C.; Hemera, A.; Mateljan, V.; Banek Zorica, M.; Stančić, H.; Seljan, S. (ed.). Zagreb : Department of Information Science, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, 2011, pp ◦ used as the initial corpus in this research 4

 The aim of this article is to: ◦ point out a trend of ‘disappearing’ web references, which are used in scientific papers:  how many of the web references are no longer active?  whether they have been relocated or completely removed from the Internet since accessing the web references during the former research? 5

 The main hypothesis is: ◦ that there has been an increase in the number of inactive web references within the aforementioned corpus since the conduction of the first research, especially because more than a year has passed.  expects that the highest number of inactive web references can be found in the graduate papers that were written during the first half of the analysed period 6

 In which domain can the web references that disappear most frequently be found?  Whether the type of the web references, their location and the presence of authors and publishers influence their lifespan?  According to the criteria that the active web references meet, what can be done to insure their longevity? 7

 reasons why the web references tend to disappear: ◦ the absence of a universal definition of web references ; ◦ disparity in the division of types of web references ; ◦ inability to, accurately, estimate their lifespan 8

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 The research was based on the analysis of data that was collected in the previous research: ◦ of graduate papers done at the Department of Information Sciences at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb:  Bauer, A.; Kirin, M.; Turković, M. Web References in Graduate Papers at the Department of Information Sciences at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. // INFuture2011 – Information Sciences and e- Society”/ Billenness, C.; Hemera, A.; Mateljan, V.; Banek Zorica, M.; Stančić, H.; Seljan, S. (ed.). Zagreb : Department of Information Science, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, 2011, pp  used as the initial corpus in this research 10

 The corpus included: ◦ a set of 362 graduate papers,  available online in the Digital Repository of the Faculty Library, ◦ in the period , ◦ 1947 web references were extracted  Study of the lifespan of web references conducted by the end of January in the year 2013 ◦ comparison of data recorded in:  June 2011 and  January

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 362 graduate papers  included 6525 references, ◦ 1947 (29.8 %) were web references, were analysed 13

The overall percentage of active and inactive web references  the results show ◦ by the end of June 2011:  781 (40.1%) web references were unavailable ◦ by the end of January 2013:  922 (47.3 %) web references were unavailable ◦ inactive web references increases for 7.2 %, 14

The change of inactive web references (from 2011 to 2013) 15

16 Categorized types of monographs and periodicals (January 2013) MonographsPeriodicals TypeNo.%TypeNo.% Web Pages Articles on Web Pages Documents /Databases on Web Pages 559.4Scientific Articles216.4 Legislation / Guidelines / Standards Entries / Articles in Dictionaries 72.2 E-books / Manuals Lectures / Videos Total585Total326

The type of Web sites: The presence of Authors and Publishers:  non-scientific, commercial: ◦ 432 (46.8 %)  educational, cultural and scientific institutions: ◦ 263 (28.5 %)  undefined : ◦ 223 (24.2 %)  Without author : ◦ 657 (71.3 %)  Without publisher : ◦ 848 (92.0 %) 17

 improve the citing system ◦ stricter, more formal obligation, ◦ required to list all the necessary bibliographical data  relocation the reference ◦ making it accessible through a redirection  citing more URL addresses for the same reference  adding extra identificator : ◦ permalink  for dynamic web sites or ◦ the digital object identifier (DOI)  for the publications published by publishing houses 18

 Research show: ◦ increase of inactive web references in researched period ◦ According to the type of references :  inactive are the most non-scientific, commercial references  But also substantial amount of educational, cultural and scientific institutions have inactive web references ◦ lack of authors and publishers among inactive web references 19

Questions? 20