Link Checker Research Articles

Availability and Audit of Links in Altmetric Data Providers: Link Checking of Blogs and News in <a href="https://www.altmetric.com/">Altmetric.com</a>, Crossref Event Data and PlumX

The aim of this paper is to compare and analyse the availability of blogs and news links from the three most important altmetric data providers (Altmetric.com, PlumX and Crossref Event Data, CED). In addition, the study explores the distribution of events by creation year in order to observe the coverage of old and new events. Researchers extracted 51,000 links from news and blogs from those providers. Those links were analysed with a link checker (Xenu’s Link Sleuth), and the statuses of those links in 2019 January were at the center of the study. The results show that 35.6% of news in Altmetric.com are not accessible and 28.9% of blog mentions in PlumX point to a broken link. These worrying percentages of broken links are due, mainly, to the employment of third parties to supply news and blog events. Altmetric.com is the service that provides a better-balanced distribution of events, while PlumX and CED group their events around the last two years. The study concludes that these aggregators need to develop a specific policy to improve the audit of these data for research evaluation processes (saving a copy of the event, employing more frequently crawls, avoiding external providers, etc.).

The Link Rot Phenomenon and its Influence on the Quality of the Websites of Rural Tourism Facilities in Poland

Summary Subject and purpose of work: The subject of the research were the profiles of links (internal and outbound ones) of websites of rural tourism facilities in Poland. The purpose of the study was to assess the scale of the link rot phenomenon and its impact on the quality of websites of rural tourism facilities in Poland. Materials and methods: The assessment of the link profile was conducted using the Broken Link Checker application. The websites’ quality assessment (the degree of their optimization for search engines) was conducted using three different applications which automate tests. Results: A total of 919 websites were examined. Broken links were recorded on 464 sites, where approximately 65% of them had only a few broken links. Broken links that referred to the description of an offer or social media accounts were particularly unfavourable. No linear correlation was recorded between the number of broken links and the website’s optimization for search engines. Conclusions: The research demonstrated that the scale of the link rot phenomenon was relatively small in the group of the examined sites. It seems, however, that this was not the result of conscious design measures or optimization.

Recovery of vanished URLs: Comparing the efficiency of Internet Archive and Google

This article examines the vanishing nature of URLs and recovery of vanished URLs through Internet Archive and Google search engine. For that purpose study investigates the URLs cited in the articles of two LIS journals published during 2009-2013. A total of 226 articles published in two open access LIS journals were selected. Of 5197 citations cited in 226 articles, 21.05 percent were URLs (1094). Study found that 38.12 percent (417 out of 5197) URLs were found missing and remaining 61.88 percent of URLs were active at the time of URL check with W3C link checker. The HTTP 404 error message – “page not found” was the overwhelming message encountered and represented 54.2 percent of all HTTP error message. Internet Archive and Google search engine were used to recover vanished URLs. However, the Internet Archive recovered 66.19 percent of the total vanished URLs, whereas, Google manages to recover only 30.70 percent of the total vanished URLs. The recovery of vanishing URLs through Internet Archive and Google increased the active URL’s rate from 61.88 per cent to 87.11 per cent and 73.58 per cent respectively. Study found that Internet Archive is a most efficient tool to recover vanished URLs compared to Google search engine.

The Navigability Validation for Middle East E-governments Websites

The current study aimed to guarantee websites quality, we should evaluate them depending on certain criteria, this is to achieve the best service. This work aimed to build a platform to evaluate the navigability validation for some e-government websites. As a contribution to the field of websites evaluation, this study evaluates the quality of e-government portal website for 15 countries in the Middle East by using common automatic website evaluation tools. The proposed websites evaluation approach is conducted according to certain metrics based on five automatic website tools which are: Link checker, Xenu, page rank, Alexa, and TAW, those tools are freely available for evaluation purposes. The assessment of these websites helps their developers for improving them and following the quality principles. We tested accessibility, usability and page rank as three criteria of websites quality assessment. Our findings may improve some standards when building and developing Middle East E-government websites, finally, they presented some recommendations to avoid the weak points in these websites.

Wayback machine: reincarnation to vanished online citations

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to know the rate of loss of online citations used as references in scholarly journals. It also indented to recover the vanished online citations using Wayback Machine and also to calculate the half-life period of online citations. Design/methodology/approach – The study selected three journals published by Emerald publication. All 389 articles published in these three scholarly journals were selected. A total of 15,211 citations were extracted of which 13,281 were print citations and only 1,930 were online citations. The online citations so extracted were then tested to determine whether they were active or missing on the Web. W3C Link Checker was used to check the existence of online citations. The online citations which got HTTP error message while testing for its accessibility were then entered in to the search box of the Wayback Machine to recover vanished online citations. Findings – Study found that only 12.69 percent (1,930 out of 15,211) citations were online citations and the percentage of online citations varied from a low of 9.41 in the year 2011 to high of 17.52 in the year 2009. Another notable finding of the research was that 30.98 percent of online citations were not accessible (vanished) and remaining 69.02 percent of online citations were still accessible (active). The HTTP 404 error message – “page not found” was the overwhelming message encountered and represented 62.98 percent of all HTTP error message. It was found that the Wayback Machine had archived only 48.33 percent of the vanished web pages, leaving 51.67 percent still unavailable. The half-life of online citations was increased from 5.40 years to 11.73 years after recovering the vanished online citations. Originality/value – This is a systematic and in-depth study on recovery of vanished online citations cited in journals articles spanning a period of five years. The findings of the study will be helpful to researchers, authors, publishers, and editorial staff to recover vanishing online citations using Wayback Machine.

English

In recent years the authors of scholarly publications have relied on e-resources. But e-resources have raised the question of permanency on the web. In this context, this article investigates the availability, persistence of Uniform Resource Locator (URL) citations cited in two Library and Information Science (LIS) journal articles published by Emerald Publishers during 2008 and 2012. In total, 2477 URLs cited in 406 research articles published in two LIS journals spanning a period of five years (2008– 2012) were extracted. The study found that 23.81 per cent (2, 477 out of 10, 400 references) of URLs were cited in these journal articles. 49.53 per cent of URL citations were not accessible and the remaining 51.47 per cent of URL citations were still accessible. The study used W3C link checker to identify HTTP errors associated with missing URLs. HTTP 500 error message—‘page not found’ was the overwhelming message that represented 39.18 per cent of all HTTP error messages. This study attempts to focus on URLs link rot and its implications for electronic publishing.

Analysis of Iranian and British university websites by world wide web consortium

The primary goal of this paper is to investigate various elements of websites and compare the quality of two groups of university website designs. The procedure for the quality assessment of website design involves various modules: Extracting components of websites, validating web pages, and identifying broken links. It continues with collecting the compared data of the existing statement of Iranian and British universities websites. The 5-point scale has been chosen as evaluator tool. Different kinds of tools are used to examine above components. These tools include: World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Link Checker, W3C markup validation service, web page analyzer, and website extractor. The W3C statistics findings show that Iranians university websites have high rate of errors compared with British university websites. These errors had been occurred in various levels of the websites: For example, HTML errors, broken links, server connectivity, image load error, and so on. It is clear that some of the websites donot followthe explicit website designing standards like W3Cs standards, and use nonprofessional designers whichcauseescalating the rate of website's errors.

Learning resources in federated environments: a broken link checker based on URL similarity

In a large federation of learning resource repositories metadata can become out of date, especially when resources are moved or deleted, frustrating users and making it critical to assure the availability of resources in any learning environment. Regularly checking all of URLs in a federation with thousands of resources negatively impacts content providers causing poor system performance, heavy network traffic and impoliteness. This paper describes a solution that ensures a balance between the number of resources and the number of checking requests performed. It uses a heuristic algorithm to select a group of resources to verify. Depending on the results, the system either stops checking or continues with a new selection of links constructed from URLs that are similar to the broken links in the previous round. To reach the global optimisation, the selection process also randomly picks other resources with a small probability of error.

Persistence and half‐life of URL citations cited in LIS open access journals

PurposeThe main purpose of the present study is to examine the availability and persistence of URL citations in two LIS open access journals. It also intended to calculate the half‐life period of URL citations cited in journal articles.Design/methodology/approachA total of 2,890 URL citations cited in 689 research articles published in LIS journals spanning a period of 14 years (1996‐2009) were extracted. In order to check the accessibility of URL citations, W3C link checker was used. After the initial check, inactive URL citations were listed. Domains and HTTP errors associated with inactive URL citations were identified for further analysis. The half‐life period was calculated using the formula t(h)=[t ln(0.5)]/[ln W(t)−ln W(0)].FindingsThe research findings indicated that 57.61 percent (397 of 689) of articles have URL citations and percentage of URL citations increased from 5.98 percent in 1996 to 27.79 percent in 2009. It was found that 26.08 percent of all citations were not accessible during the time of testing and the majority of errors were due to HTTP 404 error code (not found). The domains.net and.gov were more stable compared to the domains.com/.co,.org, and.edu. The half‐life was computed to be approximately 11.5 years, which compares favorably against earlier research works.Originality/valueThis is a comprehensive study on the availability and persistence of URL citations cited in LIS journals articles spanning a period of 14 years. The findings of the study will be helpful to authors, publishers and editorial staff to improve existing URL citation conventions and to promote URL use to ensure that URL citations are accessible in future.

Availability and persistence of web citations in Indian LIS literature

PurposeThe worldwide web is growing at an enormous speed and web citations are becoming very common in scholarly publications. However the major problem of web citation is its persistence since citations disappear over time, causing accessibility problems for readers. In this context the present study aims to investigate the availability of web citations and their persistence in Indian Library and Information Science literature. The study also aims to investigate types of link accessibility errors encountered, domains associated with missing web citations and the correlation between the path depth and missing web citations.Design/methodology/approachThe web citations (URLs) from 350 articles published in Indian Association of Teachers in Library and Information Science (IATLIS) conference volume (2001‐2008) were extracted and then tested to determine the accessibility. The W3C Link Checker (http://validator.w3.org/checklink) was used to evaluate links associated with a cited web resource. This link checker tests a submitted web page for broken or non‐valid hypertext links and reports the types of HTTP messages encountered.FindingsResults of the study show that the average citations per article have been increased substantially from 0.25 (in the year 2001) to 3.02 (in the year 2008). It also found that 45.61 per cent of citations are not accessible during the time of testing, and the majority of web citations show HTTP Error Code 404 (63.84 per cent). Web citations from the .org domain are found to have the highest failure rates (30.29 per cent) compared to .edu (21.49 per cent) and .com/.co (14.33 per cent) domains.Originality/valueThe researchers analysed 673 web citations from 350 articles published during 2001 to 2008 in IATLIS conference volumes. The study investigated the percentage of missing web citations and domains associated with missing web citations. The study suggests some possible solutions to improve web citation accessibility. This carries research value for web content providers, web authors and researchers in library and information science.

A Qualitative and Quantitative Frame Work for effective Website Design

The primary goal of this paper is to investigate various elements of website and evaluate quality of website design. The quality of website depends on various components such as download time, website size, broken links and website structure. The quality of website structure is based on its navigability, average number of clicks and structural complexity. Different kinds of tools are used to examine the components of website. These tools include: W3C Link Checker, W3C Markup Validation Service, Webpage Analyzer and Website Extractor. The W3C Link checker accepts URL address of Web page and parses each and every hyperlink to find broken links in the page. The W3C Markup Validation Service finds the errors regarding HTML tags', usage errors, properties of Web page and standards of the Web page mentioned by W3C Consortium. The errors of each web site are grouped into major and minor errors. A set of qualitative measures are identified based on these errors. The web tool PowerMapper is used to establish the sitemap for the website and path length metric is used to evaluate average number of clicks to get desired web page and web site structural complexity is determined with cyclomatic complexity. The quality of website design is measured in 10-point scale and the value suggests the improvement of the site design.

Understanding Content Management

Les systemes de gestion de contenu (SGC) ne permettent pas seulement de creer des pages HTML (HyperText Markup Language) pour les sites de grande taille, ils traitent tout le processus de collecte, de gestion et d'edition de contenu et sont cruciaux pour le commerce electronique. Du plus simple au plus elabore, l'A. decrit les fonctionnalites des differents types de systemes existants : Le SGC Web nominal, le site Web dynamique, le SGC Web integral, le SGC d'entreprise.