Related papers: The Availability and Persistence of Web References…
Large language models and deep research agents supply citation URLs to support their claims, yet the reliability of these citations has not been systematically measured. We address six research questions about citation URL validity using 10…
In this paper we present the results of a study into the persistence and availability of web resources referenced from papers in scholarly repositories. Two repositories with different characteristics, arXiv and the UNT digital library, are…
Research has shown that most resources shared in articles (e.g., URLs to code or data) are not kept up to date and mostly disappear from the web after some years (Zeng et al., 2019). Little is known about the factors that differentiate and…
We document strategies and lessons learned from sampling the web by collecting 27.3 million URLs with 3.8 billion archived pages spanning 26 years (1996-2021) from the Internet Archive's (IA) Wayback Machine. Our goal is to revisit…
Wikipedia serves as a key infrastructure for public access to scientific knowledge, but it faces challenges in maintaining the credibility of cited sources--especially when scientific papers are retracted. This paper investigates how…
Astrophysics papers often rely on software which may or may not be available, and URLs are often used as proxy citations for software and data. We extracted all URLs from two journals' 2015 research articles, removed those from certain…
BitTorrent suffers from one fundamental problem: the long-term availability of content. This occurs on a massive-scale with 38% of torrents becoming unavailable within the first month. In this paper we explore this problem by performing two…
We quantify the extent to which references to papers in scholarly literature use persistent HTTP URIs that leverage the Digital Object Identifier infrastructure. We find a significant number of references that do not, speculate why authors…
When a user requests a web page from a web archive, the user will typically either get an HTTP 200 if the page is available, or an HTTP 404 if the web page has not been archived. This is because web archives are typically accessed by URI…
One in five arXiv articles published in 2021 contained a URI to a Git Hosting Platform (GHP), which demonstrates the growing prevalence of GHP URIs in scholarly publications. However, GHP URIs are vulnerable to the same reference rot that…
Missing web pages, URIs that return the 404 "Page Not Found" error or the HTTP response code 200 but dereference unexpected content, are ubiquitous in today's browsing experience. We use Internet search engines to relocate such missing…
Commit messages contain diverse and valuable types of knowledge in all aspects of software maintenance and evolution. Links are an example of such knowledge. Previous work on "9.6 million links in source code comments" showed that links are…
Stack Overflow hosts valuable programming-related knowledge with 11,926,354 links that reference to the third-party websites. The links that reference to the resources hosted outside the Stack Overflow websites extend the Stack Overflow…
Information presented in Wikipedia articles must be attributable to reliable published sources in the form of references. This study examines over 5 million Wikipedia articles to assess the reliability of references in multiple language…
Broken links in websites external resources pose a serious threat to cybersecurity and the credibility of websites. They can be hijacked to eavesdrop user traffic or to inject malicious software. In this paper, we present the first result…
In July, 1995 the first issue of D-Lib Magazine was published as an on-line, HTML-only, open access magazine, serving as the focal point for the then emerging digital library research community. In 2017 it ceased publication, in part due to…
Zero-day vulnerabilities can be accidentally or maliciously placed in code and can remain in place for years. In this study, we address an aspect of their longevity by considering the likelihood that they will be discovered in the code…
URI redirections are integral to web management, supporting structural changes, SEO optimization, and security. However, their complexities affect usability, SEO performance, and digital preservation. This study analyzed 11 million unique…
Scholarly resources, just like any other resources on the web, are subject to reference rot as they frequently disappear or significantly change over time. Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are commonplace to persistently identify scholarly…
To perform a longitudinal investigation of web archives and detecting variations and changes replaying individual archived pages, or mementos, we created a sample of 16,627 mementos from 17 public web archives. Over the course of our…