Web citations

The present study is an attempt to carry out the citation analysis of all the journal articles published in the Annals of Library and Information Science from 2010-2019. A total of 7,124 citations appended to 328 papers were published in the journal during the ten-year study period. Average number of citations per article is maximum in 2018. Out of 7,124 citations appended, 1,039 (14.58%) citations appeared in 2010, followed by 873 (12.28%) citations in 2018, and 831 (11.66%) citations in 2013. The findings reveal that a majority of the papers have 16-20 citations (25%), followed by 11-15 (14.93%) citations, and 6-10 (14.02%) citations. The study also depicts that out of the total, 5,081 (71.29%) Web references were used in the article references. The Annals of Library and Information Science is the most preferred journal used by authors during the study period, being cited 476 times. The authorship pattern reveals that two-author citations are in the majority (46.45%). Out of the total authors who contributed a total of 328 papers, 254 (77.43%) were affiliated to the institutions located in India.

Wikipedia is a free website that anyone can freely read and edit by the login. In addition, it has been widely referred by students, researchers and other academic groups. As, many journals and academics argue that, Wikipedia is not trusty source of information in scientific publication. However, it has been increasingly used in academic and scientific publications. Furthermore, citing to Wikipedia in academic articles has dramatically changed in recent past years. The current study is to examine the cited papers in Wikipedia published in American Society for Information Science journal from 2005 to 2013 year. In this study, the first step was done by extracting bibliographical data from Scopus database. In order to identify cited paper in Wikipedia, the second step done by using Webometric Analyst Software. The data were exported via Bing Application Programming Interface (API) key using Webometric Analyst Software. The study found a total 139 publications were cited in Wikipedia out of 1485 publications. The most prolific authors were Hjørland, B. from The Royal School of Library and Information Science, Birketinget, Denmark and Thelwall, M . from Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group, University of Wolverhampton with 5 papers were cited in Wikipedia. Furthermore, the study reviewed Wikipedia cited articles and find out why, these articles have been cited in Wikipedia based on certain parameters such open access status, highly cited papers and highly cited authors (H-index and Citations). Further study noted that, both open access and closed access articles were cited in Wikipedia and majority of the cited articles in Wikipedia were closed access type. Similarly, very less number of highly cited papers were cited in Wikipedia. Significantly, majority of Wikipedia cited papers wrote by highly experienced authors. The study recommended that Wikipedia can be used in academic literature since many peer-review journal articles have been cited in Wikipedia.

The present study makes an attempt to explore and analyze the growth and decay rate of URL
citations cited in one of the eminent information web magazine ARIADNE. All the web citations cited
in the featured article section of ARIADNE web magazine spanning a period of three years (2010-
2012) were identified and downloaded. All the URLs provided in the web citations were checked by
W3C link checker (http://validator.w3.org/checklink) to test whether they were accessible or not.
Web resources are used more than the printed ones. Though the number of references in web based
format is more in use but a significant number of web references lose their identity with the passage
of time. The results indicate that early published papers have collectively a larger number of missing
web citation compared to the recent ones. It was found that majority of errors were due to the
missing content (http 404-file not found) representing 52.68% of all http error codes followed by
“http 500” (24.73%) and “http 403” (19.35%). The “.com/.co” domain was also found to be the most
stable and persistent domain with 95 per cent accessibility. The greatest number of web resources
cited in the articles, were found to be of “html” and “htmls” formats and “ppt” files were found to be
most stable with 100% accessibility. Finally, the study confirms that continued availability of web
resources is not guaranteed because of the dying phenomenon of web based references, but there
can be certain solutions (WebCite, LOCKSS etc) that can prevent the decay or disappearance of web
citations.