Rotten web citations cited in scholarly journals: use of time travel for retrieval

Purpose The present study compares the use of web citations as references in leading scholarly journals in Library and Information Science (LIS) and Communication and Media Studies (CMS). A total of 20 journals (each 10 from LIS and CMS) were selected based on the publishing history and reputation published between 2008 and 2017. Design/methodology/approach The present study compares the use of web citations as references in leading scholarly journals in LIS and CMS. A PHP script was used to crawl the Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) collected from the reference list. A total of 12,251 articles were downloaded and 555,428 references were extracted. Of the 555,428 references, 102,718 web citations were checked for their accessibility. Findings The research findings indicated that 76.90% URLs from LIS journals and 84.32% URLs from Communication and Media Studies journals were accessible and others were rotten. The majority of errors were due to HTTP 404 error code (not found) in both the disciplines. The study also tried to retrieve the rotten URLs through Time Travel, which revived 61.76% rotten URLs in LIS journal articles and 65.46% in CMS journal articles. Originality/value This is an in-depth and comprehensive comparative study on the availability of web citations in LIS and CMS journals articles spanning a period of 10 years. The findings of the study will be helpful to authors, publishers, and editorial staff to ensure that web citations will be accessible in the future.