Web Research
Internet References Are Frequently Lost, Says Study By University of Colorado Health Sciences Center
From the story, Anyone who has ever typed an Internet address into a Web browser and received a message that the page was not available knows how frustrating it can be to look for information on the Internet. In a study appearing in this week’s issue of Science titled “Going, Going, Gone: Lost Internet References,” researchers found that very important scientific information is sometimes hard to find on the Internet… Internet references accounted for 2.6 percent of all references in a sample of more than 1000 articles published between 2000 and 2003 in three journals: The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association and Science. In articles up to only 27 months old, 13 percent of Internet references were inactive, making substantial amounts of information unavailable.
UPDATE: The complete article is available (no charge) by visiting the lead author’s web site and clicking on the full text link next to the title, “Going, going, gone: lost Internet references”. It’s the first article listed under “selected publications.”

This entry was posted on Friday, October 31st, 2003 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.