Reference Hygiene and Death on the Internet - Decay, Rot, Half-Life, Deterioration, and Corruption.

Background And Objectives: References for medical articles are not always retrievable. This eliminates the ability to check on the validity of statements, methodologies, data collection, and conclusions.

Methods: References of review, scientific, and research articles published in the 2019 and 2020 were evaluated for ability to retrieve the reference cited.

Results: Ninety-five articles with 2,424 references were evaluated. There were 1,025 (1,025/2,424 = 42.3%) open access versus 1,399 (1,399/2,424 = 47.7%) paywall articles. There were 357 (14.7%) citations unavailable (misreference) due to bad, broken, or nonexistent links and wrong article, abstract or citation only, and missing citations.

Conclusion: Loss of reference existence or retrievability is a scientific hazard. Science is self-correcting but is doomed to not knowing what was said or discovered when references are no longer available.