Persistent URIs Must Be Used To Be Persistent

TL;DR

This paper investigates the use of persistent HTTP URIs in scholarly references, highlighting the prevalence of non-persistent links, analyzing reasons for this issue, and proposing solutions to improve citation durability.

Contribution

It quantifies the usage of persistent URIs in scholarly references and proposes an approach to increase their adoption for better citation persistence.

Findings

Many references do not use persistent URIs.

Authors often choose brittle URIs over persistent ones.

Proposed approach aims to improve URI persistence in citations.

Abstract

We quantify the extent to which references to papers in scholarly literature use persistent HTTP URIs that leverage the Digital Object Identifier infrastructure. We find a significant number of references that do not, speculate why authors would use brittle URIs when persistent ones are available, and propose an approach to alleviate the problem.