Availability of Web Citations in Scholarly Library and Information Science Journals: A Study Niveditha B.1,*, Kumbar Mallinath2 1UGC, Junior Research Fellow, University of Mysore, Manasagangotri, Mysore-570006, Karnataka, India 2Professor, Department of Library and Information Science, University of Mysore, Manasagangotri, Mysore-570006, Karnataka, India *Corresponding author email id: niveditha.jb@gmail.com
Online published on 19 August, 2020. Abstract The present study examines the availability of web citations in scholarly journals of Library and Information Science. The journals were selected based on their high impact factor published between 2008 and 2017. A PHP script was used to test the Uniform Resource Locators for their availability. A total of 7986 articles were downloaded and 3,24,636 references were extracted. A total of 51,839 URLs were checked for their availability. Further the lexical features of URLs like file extension, path depth, character length and top-level domain was determined. The research findings indicated that the percentage of web citations in articles has been continuously increased from 2008 to 2017. The result of the accessibility check showed that almost 76.90% of URLs were accessible and the remaining 23.10% encountered accessibility errors. The majority of errors were due to HTTP 404 error code (Not found error). The findings of the study will be helpful to authors, publishers and editorial staff to ensure that web citations will be accessible in future. Top Keywords References, Web citations, URLs, DOIs, HTTP error, PHP. Top |