Scholarly Context Not Found¶
Klein, M., Van de Sompel, H., Sanderson, R., Shankar, H., Balakireva, L., Zhou, K., & Tobin, R. (2014). Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot. PLOS ONE, 9(12).
Cited by¶
5 citations across 5 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Mechanisms¶
- Canonical Link and Attribution Handle
- Its central failure mode is link rot — the slow decay by which URLs stop resolving as sites move and reorganize, so a handle that looked durable at publication silently dies.
This sourceDefines link rot as age-related loss of access when previously usable referenced URLs cease resolving.
- Its central failure mode is link rot — the slow decay by which URLs stop resolving as sites move and reorganize, so a handle that looked durable at publication silently dies.
- Knowledge-Base Cleanup Rotation
- The corpus stops accumulating content decay and link rot — the slow drift where documentation quietly stops describing reality — because every article has a scheduled date with a named owner rather than waiting for a reader to hit the wall.
This sourceDefines link rot as loss of access and content drift as change that can make a resource cease to represent the content originally referenced.
- The corpus stops accumulating content decay and link rot — the slow drift where documentation quietly stops describing reality — because every article has a scheduled date with a named owner rather than waiting for a reader to hit the wall.
- Persistent Identifier Minting
- Its strength is that it defeats link rot — the steady decay of URLs into dead ends — and in the same act makes the artifact citable and anchored to its origin, even as copies, forks, and mirrors proliferate.
This sourceDocuments link rot as the loss of actionable access when referenced web URIs cease to return the intended resource.
- Its strength is that it defeats link rot — the steady decay of URLs into dead ends — and in the same act makes the artifact citable and anchored to its origin, even as copies, forks, and mirrors proliferate.
- Persistent-Identifier Resolution Policy
- Its strength is that it is the direct defense against reference rot
This sourceDefines reference rot as the combination of link rot and content drift that prevents later recovery of the web context cited by scholarly articles.
- Its strength is that it is the direct defense against reference rot
- Stale Reference Monitor
- It is the right tool when staleness is systemic and recurring rather than incidental: cache and replica lag, cached approvals that keep expiring, link rot across a large corpus, feeds that quietly fall behind.
This sourceDocuments link rot at scale across a corpus of scholarly articles containing references to web resources.
- It is the right tool when staleness is systemic and recurring rather than incidental: cache and replica lag, cached approvals that keep expiring, link rot across a large corpus, feeds that quietly fall behind.
Verification¶
Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.
Does it back the claim? Not recorded. Neither this nor any other of the 5 citations of this work carries a recorded support check.
Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.
See how references were verified.
Registry ID ref:ba6985471248 · see in the full table