The life and death of URLs in five biomedical informatics journals

Abstract

With the increased use of the World Wide Web has come an increase in the number of Uniform Resource Locator (URL) references cited in journals. Out of the 17,698 references we collected from five biomedical informatics journals between 1999 and 2005, 6.8% contained URLs. Overall, 22.6% of these URLs were inaccessible. In-press articles had 10.8% unavailable URLs. Approaches that guarantee permanent access to URL citations of scientific publications are needed.

Figure 1

Retrieval rates of active URLs by year