Fri, 04 Jul 2008 23:40:02 BST CiteULike: Gaetan's Wren http://www.citeulike.org/user/Gaetan/author/Wren CiteULike.org en-gb Copyright © 2004-2008 citeulike.org http://www.citeulike.org/user/Gaetan/article/2677091 <i>Bioinformatics (15 April 2008), btn127.</i><br /><br />Motivation: Internet-based electronic resources, as given by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), are being increasingly used in scientific publications but are also becoming inaccessible in a time-dependant manner, a phenomenon documented across disciplines. Initial reports brought attention to the problem, spawning methods of effectively preserving URL content while some journals adopted policies regarding URL publication and begun storing supplementary information on journal websites. Thus, a re-examination of URL growth and decay in the literature is merited to see if the problem has grown or been mitigated by any of these changes Results: After the 2003 study, three follow-up studies were conducted in 2004, 2005 and 2007. Unfortunately, no significant change was found in the rate of URL decay among any of the studies. However, only 5% of URLs cited more than twice have decayed versus 20% of URLs cited once or twice. The most common types of lost content were computer programs (43%), followed by scholarly content (38%) and databases (19%). Compared to URLs still available, no lost content type was significantly over or under-represented. Searching for 30 of these websites using Google, 11 (37%) were found relocated to different URLs. Conclusions: URL decay continues unabated, but URLs published by organizations tend to be more stable. Repeated citation of URLs suggests calculation of an electronic impact factor (eIF) would be an objective, quantitative way to measure the impact of Internet-based resources on scientific research. Contact: Jonathan-Wren@OMRF.org 10.1093/bioinformatics/btn127 URL decay in MEDLINE - a 4-year follow-up study Jonathan Wren doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btn127 Bioinformatics (15 April 2008), btn127. 2008-04-16T08:15:26-00:00 2008 Bioinformatics btn127 medline http://www.citeulike.org/user/Gaetan/article/2048100 <i>Bioinformatics (1 December 2007), btm574.</i><br /><br />Motivation: Duplicate publication impacts the quality of the scientific corpus, has been difficult to detect, and studies this far have been limited in scope and size .Using text similarity searches, we were able to identify signatures of duplicate citations among a body of abstracts. Results: A sample of 62,213 Medline citations was examined and a database of manually verified duplicate citations was created to study author publication behavior. We found that 0.04% of the citations with no shared authors were highly similar and are thus potential cases of plagiarism. 1.35% with shared authors were sufficiently similar to be considered a duplicate. Extrapolating, this would correspond to 3,500 and 117,500 duplicate citations in total, respectively. Availability: eTBLAST, an automated citation matching tool, and Deja vu, the duplicate citation database, are freely available at http://invention.swmed.edu/ and http:/spore.swmed.edu/dejavu. Contact: Harold.Garner@utsouthwestern.edu 10.1093/bioinformatics/btm574 Deja vu A Study of Duplicate Citations in Medline Mounir Errami Justin Hicks Wayne Fisher David Trusty Jonathan Wren Tara Long Harold Garner doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btm574 Bioinformatics (1 December 2007), btm574. 2007-12-03T07:40:20-00:00 2007 Bioinformatics btm574 medline