Web Citations Analysis of the JASSS: the First Ten Years

The aim of this research is to scrutinize the accessibility and decay of web citations (URLs) used in the refereed articles published by Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS). To do this, at first, we downloaded all articles of JASSS from 1998 to 2007. After acquiring all articles, their web citations are extracted and analyzed from the accessibility and decay point of view. Moreover, for initially missed web citations complementary pathways such as using internet explorer and Google search engine are employed. Then, data collected are analyzed using descriptive statistical methods. The study revealed that at first check 75% of web citations are accessible while 25% disappeared. It is notable that rate of accessibility increased to 94% and rate of decay decreased to 6% after using complementary pathways. The .edu/.ac.xx domain with the accessibility of 98% (decay, 2%) has the most stability and persistency among all domains, while the most stable files format was PDF with the accessibility of 99% (decay, 1%) and HTM/HTML files with 96% accessibility (4%). Finally, some suggestions and recommendations are presented to stop, or diminish, decay phenomenon.