Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Date of this Version
2019
Abstract
The aim of this research is to scrutiny the accessibility and decay of web citations (URLs) used in refereed articles published by 27 Computer Science open access journals as indexed by Scopus. To do this, at first, we downloaded 1000 articles of Computer Science open access journals from 2009 to 2018. After acquiring articles, their web citations are extracted and analyzed from the accessibility and decay point of view. Moreover, for initially missed web citations complementary pathways such as using Google search engine are employed. Then, data collected are analyzed using descriptive statistical methods. Research findings indicated that 80.7% of articles have Web citations and rate of articles containing URL has increased from 72% in 2009 to 94% in 2018. The study revealed that at first check 78% of URLs are accessible, while 22% per cent have disappeared. It is notable that the rate of accessibility increased to 92% and the rate of decay decreased to 8% after using complementary pathways. The .edu/.ac domain, with an availability of 89% (a decay of 11%) has the greatest stability and persistence among all domains, while the most stable file format is PDF, with an availability of 85% (a decay of 15%).