DENVER, Oct. 30 (AScribe Newswire) -- Anyone who has ever typed an Internet address into a Web browser and received a message that the page was not available knows how frustrating it can be to look for information on the Internet. In a study appearing in this week's issue of Science titled "Going, Going, Gone: Lost Internet References," researchers found that very important scientific information is sometimes hard to find on the Internet.
References, the information used by authors to support arguments in journal articles, are increasingly pointing to information on the Internet, and these Internet references are often lost within months, according to a study performed at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.
Internet references accounted for 2.6 percent of all references in a sample of more than 1000 articles published between 2000 and 2003 in three journals: The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association and Science. In articles up to only 27 months old, 13 percent of Internet references were inactive, making substantial amounts of information unavailable.
"References are vital tools for the critical analysis of any argument," said Dr. Robert Dellavalle, lead author of the study and an assistant professor in CU-Health Sciences Center's Department of Dermatology. "While paper journals printed hundreds of years ago can be readily obtained, references to Internet information in the current issues of prominent journals are sometimes unavailable."
Dellavalle and colleagues Amanda Drake, Marla Graber, Lauren Heilig, Dr. Eric Hester, Jeff Kuntzman, and Dr. Lisa Schilling decided to systematically investigate Internet reference accessibility due to frequent problems locating Internet information cited in articles.
Dellavalle and colleagues said they believe the Internet is a valuable and useful tool for scientific research that will continue to be used in the future. However, the team concluded that new policies for documenting and archiving Internet information used for scientific research, such as requiring scientists to submit a printed hard copy of referenced Internet information, are urgently needed.
"To preserve the integrity of all academic literature, readers, authors, editors, publishers and librarians must quickly adopt better methods of Internet referencing," Dellavalle suggested.
The University of Colorado Health Sciences Center is one
of four campuses in the University of Colorado
system. Located in Denver and Aurora, Colo., the center
includes schools of medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and
dentistry, a graduate school and a teaching hospital. For
more information, visit the Web site at www.uchsc.edu.
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