The Missing Link: Assessing the Reliability of Internet Citations in History Journals

One of the bedrock values of professional historians is reliance on verifiable documentation.We have well-developed methods for storing, citing, and finding many media, including books, journals, and archival material.Recently, historians have relied on a new medium, the internet, to document the sources of their information.Scholars in the sciences, however, have raised alarms about the frequency with which internet sources have disappeared after their citation in journals.An influential article in Science found that 13 percent of internet citations in three leading journals were inactive within twenty-seven months of publication.In five leading medical journals, 4.4 percent of internet citations were inaccessible within three months of publication.In six oncology journals, 33 percent of internet citations decayed within twenty-nine months. 1