washingtonpost.com: On the Web, Research Work Proves Ephemeral:
"It was in the mundane course of getting a scientific paper published that physician Robert Dellavalle came to the unsettling realization that the world was dissolving before his eyes.

The world, that is, of footnotes, references and Web pages."

Dellavalle, a dermatologist with the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Denver, had co-written a research report featuring dozens of footnotes -- many of which referred not to books or journal articles but, as is increasingly the case these days, to Web sites that he and his colleagues had used to substantiate their findings.

Problem was, it took about two years for the article to wind its way to publication. And by that time, many of the sites they had cited had moved to other locations on the Internet or disappeared altogether, rendering useless all those Web addresses -- also known as uniform resource locators (URLs) -- they had provided in their footnotes.

"Every time we checked, some were gone and others had moved," said Dellavalle, who is on the faculty at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. "We thought, 'This is an interesting phenomenon itself. We should look at this.' "

He and his co-workers have done just that, and what they have found is not reassuring to those who value having a permanent record of scientific progress. In research described in the journal Science last month, the team looked at footnotes from scientific articles in three major journals -- the New England Journal of Medicine, Science and Nature -- at three months, 15 months and 27 months after publication. The prevalence of inactive Internet references grew during those intervals from 3.8 percent to 10 percent to 13 percent.

"I think of it like the library burning in Alexandria," Dellavalle said, referring to the 48 B.C. sacking of the ancient world's greatest repository of knowledge. "We've had all these hundreds of years of stuff available by interlibrary loan, but now things just a few years old are disappearing right under our noses really quickly."


http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8730-2003Nov23