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. Attempts were made to locate the unavailable resources.

Results: After checking twice, 49.3% of the original 2,011 cited resources could not be located at the cited URL. The older the article, the more likely that URLs in the reference list of that article were inactive (r = -0.62, P<0.001, n = 1,968). There was no difference in availability across resource types (chi(2) = 5.28, df = 2, P = 0.07, n = 1,786). Whether an URL was active varied by top-level domain (chi(2) = 14.92, df = 4, P = 0.00, n = 1,786).

Conclusions: URL decay is a serious problem in health care management journals. In addition to using website archiving tools like WebCite, publishers should require authors to both keep copies of Internet-based information they used and deposit copies of data with the publishers.