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. 2006 Feb;7(2):122-7.
doi: 10.1038/sj.embor.7400631.

E-mail decay rates among corresponding authors in MEDLINE. The ability to communicate with and request materials from authors is being eroded by the expiration of e-mail addresses

Jonathan D Wren  1 , Joe E Grissom, Tyrrell Conway
Affiliations

E-mail decay rates among corresponding authors in MEDLINE. The ability to communicate with and request materials from authors is being eroded by the expiration of e-mail addresses

Jonathan D Wren et al. EMBO Rep. 2006 Feb.

Erratum in

  • EMBO Rep. 2006 Apr;7(4):455

Abstract

The ability to communicate with and request materials from authors is being eroded by the expiration of e-mail addresses

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Number of e-mail addresses published in MEDLINE per year compared with the number of articles per year (solid line). Also shown is the number of unique e-mail addresses published (dashed line), which is growing more slowly than the total number (dotted line).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Method for processing and querying e-mail addresses. Scripts to check the availability of e-mail addresses were written in Perl and run on a Sun Ultra-10 400 MHz Sparc workstation running Solaris 9 with a 100 Mbps Full-Duplex Ethernet adaptor.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Growth in the percentage of e-mail addresses in a domain that accepts any e-mail address as valid according to the year that the domain first appeared in MEDLINE.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Percentage of author e-mail addresses returning an error code. Those published in MEDLINE that were not valid when queried in October/November 2004 are shown as a dotted line. The year refers to the date of their first appearance in MEDLINE. The solid line represents addresses not valid due to a bad domain.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Number of corresponding author e-mails associated with domain names. (A) The number of corresponding author e-mails (CAEs) associated with the 5,000 domains published most frequently, and (B) distribution in the number of CAEs attached to domains that have become invalid (blue line) and the number of times an e-mail address in that domain was published (grey line). The y-axis in (B) is limited to intervals of 200 so the trend is visible and only the first 1,000 records are shown, sorted in descending order.
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