ArticleApplied clinical informatics2013
Decay of references to Web sites in articles published in general medical journals: mainstream vs small journals.
Article in Applied clinical informatics, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Use it or lose it: citations predict the continued online availability of published bioinformatics resources.Nucleic acids research · 2017Review
- Preserving the Integrity of Citations and References by All Stakeholders of Science Communication.Journal of Korean medical science · 2015Review
- Are current archiving systems reliable enough?International urogynecology journal · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundOver the last decade, Web sites (URLs) have been increasingly cited in scientific articles. However, the contents of the page of interest may change over the time.
objectiveTo investigate the trend of citation to URLs in five general medical journals since January 2006 to June 2013 and to compare the trends in mainstream journals with small journals.
methodsReferences of all original articles and review articles published between January 2006 and June 2013 in three regional journals - Archives of Iranian Medicine (AIM), Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal (EMHJ), and Journal of Postgraduate Medical Institute (JPMI) - and two mainstream journals - The Lancet and British Medical Journal (BMJ) - were reviewed. The references were checked to determine the frequency of citation to URLs as well as the rate of accessibility of the URLs cited.
resultsA total of 2822 articles was studied. Since January 2006 onward, the number of citations to URLs increased in the journals (doubling time ranged from 4.2 years in EMHJ to 13.9 years in AIM). Overall, the percentage of articles citing at least one URL has increased from 24% in 2006 to 48.5% in 2013. Accessibility to URLs decayed as the references got old (half life ranged from 2.2 years in EMHJ to 5.3 years in BMJ). The ratio of citation to URLs in the studied mainstream journals, as well as the ratio of URLs accessible were significantly (p<0.001) higher than the small medical journals.
conclusionURLs are increasingly cited, but their contents decay with time. The trend of citing and decaying URLs are different in mainstream journals compared to small medical journals. Decay of URL contents would jeopardize the accuracy of the references and thus, the body of evidence. One way to tackle this important obstacle is to archive URLs permanently.
Indexed as
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.