| Abstrakt: |
This research was intended to comparatively investigate the currency, disappearance and half-life of URLs of web resources cited in Iranian researchers' articles indexed in ISI in information science, psychology and management from 2009 to 2011. The research method was citation analysis. The statistical population of this research was all articles by Iranian researchers in psychology, information science and management from 2009 to 2011 which were indexed in SSCI. In order to extract bibliographic information of articles, ISI database was searched and the titles of the articles were extracted. After investigating the currency and disappearance of cited URLs and calculating the half-life of web resources, collected data were analyzed in accordance with research questions by means of Excel Software. The results of this research revealed that in articles written by Iranian researchers indexed in ISI in information science, psychology and management there were 6152, 3639 and 8926 citations, respectively, of which 13.7, 44.8 and 14.23 percent were online citations, respectively. The most frequently used domain in all three fields was .org. The most stable and persistent domain in psychology was .com, in information science was .org and in management was for those domains other than the mentioned domains. The most frequent file format was pdf in all three fields. In information science, pdf. Files were the most stable while in management, rtf files and in psychology, ppt files were the most stable ones, respectively. In the initial search for online citations in psychology, information science and management, respectively, 58, 82 and 88 percent of citations were accessible which were even increased after second check with due measurements to 95, 98 and 97 percent, respectively. The research results also demonstrated that most accessible internet addresses in investigated articles of all three fields were found in the cited internet address. The status of inaccessible internet addresses in all investigated articles regarding error messages also indicated that in psychology and management 404 error message (Not found) was the most frequent error with 34 and 22 percent, respectively and in information science, 403 error message (forbidden) was the most frequent error message with 21 percent. The average half-life of online citations calculated in all investigated articles was 2.6 years which was calculated as 3 years and 4 months in information science, 2 years and 5 months in management and 1 year and 9 months in psychology. The results of this research showed that decay of internet addresses should be regarded as a problem the most important reason of which is website reorganization and changes made to the names of internet domains. Some fields are more exposed to and affected by the consequences of decay of internet addresses. The influence of inactive links on the journals of a field is different based on the reliance of authors on internet based information. The absolute number of internet addresses also strengthens the problem of decay of internet addresses for the readers of the articles as compared with those journals whose authors have only cited a few online citations. The consequences of inactive links for those articles and resources which can be accessed through different ways or their print version is accessible are less serious. Tools like internet archives might make it possible to have a snapshot of the content of a site in a particular time. Google doesn't index dynamic pages or pages and sites which use robots.txt coding to prevent crawling. The best solution to improve the accessibility of internet resources is to request for all internet information be analyzed and recorded while examining the manuscripts. In so doing, the responsibility to archive information will be assigned to the publisher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
