Raising the Dead: Recovery of Decayed Online Citations
Daniela V. Dimitrova, Michael J. Bugeja · 2007
Recent studies show that online footnotes decay over time. This study investigates how researchers can resurrect lapsed citations, comparing two retrieval methods—online archives and search engines. The Wayback Machine and Google were used to retrieve missing online citations from six traditional communication journals. Analysis shows that the Wayback Machine was more efficient, suggesting archives are a better method for citation retrieval than search engines. Implications of these findings for scholars in multiple disciplines are discussed.