MoCU Repository

Persistence and decay of web citations used in theses and dissertations available at the Sokoine National Agricultural Library, Tanzania

Show simple item record

dc.contributor.author Sife, Alfred S.
dc.contributor.author Bernard, Ronald
dc.date.accessioned 2023-08-18T09:55:49Z
dc.date.available 2023-08-18T09:55:49Z
dc.date.issued 2013
dc.identifier.uri http://repository.mocu.ac.tz/xmlui/handle/123456789/518
dc.description.abstract A study was conducted to examine the persistence and decay of web citations in theses and dissertations available at the Sokoine National Agricultural Library. Specifically, the study assessed the accessibility status of cited URLs, identified error messages and top level domains of inaccessible URLs, and calculated the half-life of web citations. Eighty-three theses and dissertations that were dated between 2007 and 2011 were stratified according to their years of publication and randomly selected for the study. These gave a total of 15,468 citations of which 1,487 (9.6%) were web citations. The findings show that a total of 862 (58%) web citations were inaccessible. The 404 File Not Found error message was the most (92.7%) encountered and the .com domain had the greatest number (28.2%) of missing URLs. The average half-life for the URLs cited in theses and dissertations was 2.5 years. The study findings therefore indicate that many web resources cited in theses and dissertations available at SNAL had disappeared from their original locations. Collaborative efforts are thus required from various stakeholders in order to reduce the problem of URL decay. en_US
dc.language.iso en en_US
dc.publisher Sokoine University of Agriculture en_US
dc.relation.ispartofseries Vol. 9;No. 2
dc.subject Web en_US
dc.subject Citations en_US
dc.subject URL persistence en_US
dc.subject URL decay en_US
dc.subject Theses en_US
dc.subject Dissertations en_US
dc.subject Tanzania en_US
dc.title Persistence and decay of web citations used in theses and dissertations available at the Sokoine National Agricultural Library, Tanzania en_US
dc.type Article en_US


Files in this item

This item appears in the following Collection(s)

Show simple item record

Search MoCU IR


Browse

My Account