Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Abstract
The present study examines the accessibility of URLs cited in the journals of Library and Information Science. The journals were selected based on their high impact factor published between 2008 and 2017. A PHP script was used to crawl the Uniform Resource Locators (URL) collected from the reference list. A total of 3,24,636 references were extracted from 7986 articles, out of which 51,839 had URLs. The research findings indicated that 23.10% of URLs were inaccessible. The majority of errors were due to the HTTP 404 error code (Not found error), which accounted for 83.10%. The study retrieved 61.76% of inaccessible URLs through web archives and 56.15% of URLs through Google. The accessibility rate increased after the retrieval of URLs. The HTTP error codes of retrieved URLs were also determined. The publishers, editorial team and authors should make certain that the URLs are available to the scholarly community without any hindrance