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

[Michael Scarce]

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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