Objectives: Citing Internet-based resources is common in scholarship today. The fundamental nature of the Web, however, leaves many originally cited sources unstable, affecting the integrity and reproducibility of the published work. The Hiberlink Project coined the term “reference rot” to describe this problem. The library profession is charged with preserving the scholarly record of research, but how well is our own scholarly record preserved? The purpose of this study is to assess the frequency of reference rot in articles published in the Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA) over the past 10 years.
Methods: Standard practice for citing web-based resources in bibliographies is the use of Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs), most commonly in the form of Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). References from all articles published in JMLA between January 2010 and December 2019 possessing a PubMed ID were extracted from PubMed Central. From this set of all references, a subset containing URIs (with the exception of those with Digital Object Identifiers, or DOIs) were identified and then tested on the web to see if they remain active and/or accurate. Frequency of both link rot (broken links) and content drift (working links that now point to different content) within the URIs was determined.
Results: A total of 626 items published in JMLA between the years 2010-2019 are indexed in PubMed. The total number of citations from this corpus is 10,832. Of these, 2,305 (21.28%) are URIs pointing to web-based sites and/or products other than those with minted DOIs. Only 64.21% of these URIs (1,480) continue to accurately lead to the referenced content.
Conclusions: Preservation and access are two key pillars of the library and information profession. Previous research shows the prevalence of reference rot in Science, Technology, and Medicine publications is approximately 20%. The comparably high occurrence (~36%) of this same issue within the professional journal of the Medical Library Association is a threat to both the reproducibility of the Association's scholarly record and to the integrity of the medical and health sciences library profession. Given that the citing of web resources continues to rise in publications, it prompts the need to examine current citation practices and establish new guidelines that will ensure (1) the content referenced in JMLA's publications can continue to be located and validated over time, and (2) that a profession charged with preserving scholarship is doing so.