Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: The Stability of Cited Electronic References.

Numerous studies of the accuracy of citations have appeared for a variety of disciplines including library and information science. To date, these studies have focused on the print format of the professional literatures. It is only recently that studies have been performed on the professional literature available electronically, specifically Internet resources. The research conducted thus far has primarily addressed the growing body of electronic journals and related issues of accessibility and retrieval. Preservation issues have also been discussed. What have not been examined are citations to documents available on the Internet that are increasingly being referenced in the research literature. How stable are electronic resources over time? What percentage of errors occurs in electronic references? What types of references (i.e., HTTP, FTP, Gopher, Listservs) are most stable over time? What types of errors exist in citations? Do the number of errors for a given type increase over time? In this study, all citations to electronic resources for 10 library and information science journals for 1994-98 were examined. The total number of retrieved citations was calculated by year and type. Errors were sorted by type and classified as major or minor. It was found that the average rate of stability of all electronic resources for the time period examined was 55.1%. (Contains 29 references and 12 tables.) (Author/MES)