The Future of Web Citation Practices

ABSTRACT

Citing webpages has been a common practice in scholarly publications for nearly two decades as the Web evolved into a major information source. But over the years, more and more bibliographies have suffered from “reference rot”: Cited URLs are broken links or point to a page that no longer contains the content the author originally cited. In this column, I look at several studies showing how reference rot has affected different academic disciplines. I also examine citation styles’ approach to citing Web sources. I then turn to emerging Web citation practices: Perma, a “freemium” Web archiving service specifically for citation; and the Internet Archive, the largest Web archive.