[Air-L] (link to) verifying internet content --- Re: Criteria for proving that online data (especially forum comments) are real?

Michael Scarce scarce at mac.com
Sat Jul 28 05:10:06 PDT 2012


Here is the service:

http://www.webcitation.org

Description from the site:

The Problem
Authors increasingly cite webpages and other digital objects on the Internet, which can "disappear" overnight. In one study published in the journal Science, 13% of Internet references in scholarly articles were inactive after only 27 months. Another problem is that cited webpages may change, so that readers see something different than what the citing author saw. The problem of unstable webcitations and the lack of routine digital preservation of cited digital objects has been referred to as an issue "calling for an immediate response" by publishers and authors [1].

An increasing number of editors and publishers ask that authors, when they cite a webpage, make a local copy of the cited webpage/webmaterial, and archive the cited URL in a system like WebCite®, to enable readers permanent access to the cited material.

What is WebCite®?
WebCite®, which used to be a member of member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium, is an on-demand archiving system for webreferences (cited webpages and websites, or other kinds of Internet-accessible digital objects), which can be used by authors, editors, and publishers of scholarly papers and books, to ensure that cited webmaterial will remain available to readers in the future. If cited webreferences in journal articles, books etc. are not archived, future readers may encounter a "404 File Not Found" error when clicking on a cited URL. Try it! Archive a URL here. It's free and takes only 30 seconds.

A WebCite®-enhanced reference is a reference which contains - in addition to the original live URL (which can and probably will disappear in the future, or its content may change) - a link to an archived copy of the material, exactly as the citing author saw it when he accessed the cited material.


On Jul 28, 2012, at 4:52 AM, Michael Scarce wrote:

> Maybe you're already familiar with these, but try the following:
> http://www.kfinder.com/newweb/Publishers/MedCite/MedCite.html#CiteVerify
> 
> It appears that MedCite might have gone under, but it was a wonderful and free service for researchers. You could simply enter the URL of the web content you wanted to reference, MedCite would actually archive and store the content, and then issue a kind of doc ID to be used in your reference citation, making it easy for others to access that same stored content.
> 
> In lieu of that, try the Internet Archive's "Wayback Machine." at http://www.archive.org
> 
> Because Internet content is so dynamic and constantly disappearing, I have relied on the Wayback Machine heavily to access sites and information that have been long gone for more than a decade.
> 
> If other utilize different methods for this sort of thing, please share.
> 
> Michael Scarce
> 
> 
> _________________________________
> Michael Scarce
> Michael.Scarce at ucsf.edu
> 
> Research Specialist
> UCSF Division of Infectious Diseases / 
> Center for AIDS Prevention Studies
> 50 Beale Street, Suite 1300
> San Francisco, CA  94105 
> 
>   phone 	(415) 597-4979
>   fax 	(415) 597-9213
> 
> On Jul 26, 2012, at 1:22 PM, Maria Eronen wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> Would anyone know what are the criteria concerning internet material's validity? Is it common that you as a researcher will be asked to prove that the material you have collected from the internet is real. Since a lot of internet data disappears everyday, mere url addresses are not enough. Even html files can be modified after saving webpages.
>> 
>> I would appreciate if someone had time to answer.
>> 
>> Maria
>> 
>> 
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