Disappearing act: decay of uniform resource locators in health care management journals.

Objectives: This study examines the problem of decay of uniform resource locators (URLs) in health care management journals and seeks to determine whether continued availability at a given URL relates to the date of publication, the type of resource, or the top-level URL domain.

Methods: The authors determined the availability of web-based resources cited in articles published in five source journals from 2002 to 2004. The data were analyzed using correlation, chi-square, and descriptive statistics.