The lifespan of web references : an example in graduate papers at the Department of information sciences in Zagreb

Bauer, Anina and Pečarić, Đilda. (2013). The lifespan of web references : an example in graduate papers at the Department of information sciences in Zagreb. In: 4th International Conference "The Future of Information Sciences: INFuture2013 – Information Governance", 6-8 November 2013, Zagreb.

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Abstract

An increasing amount of students and scholars use web references as a prime source in their papers. The main concern is that those references have a short lifespan. In retrospect to that, the aim of this article is to show how many of the web references, gathered in a corpus of 1947 web references within 362 graduate papers at the Department of Information Sciences at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb in the period from 2003 to 2010, are no longer active, i.e. accessible. It was also substantial to know how many of the web references have disappeared in the period between two researches. The main hypothesis is that there has been an increase in the number of inactive web references within the aforementioned corpus. It is expected that the highest number of inactive web references is present in the graduate papers that have been written during the first half of the analysed period, i.e. more time has passed since those references have been accessed. As well as the availability of the web references, certain bibliographic data were also analysed, where it is predicted that according to the type of web references web pages are more likely to be inactive than any other types such as scientific articles, etc. In response to that, it is expected that the web sites of inactive web references are non-scientific in snature. The analysis of the presence of authors and publishers among inactive web references is also included.

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