Web Citations and Decay of URLs: A Case Study of Indian Journal of Agricultural Library and Information Services.

The present study is conducted to identify the prevailing citation trends, durability of web citations or URLs, decay and half-life of URLs by analyzing articles’ citations of Indian Journal of Agricultural Library and Information Services published during 2012 -2016. A total of 980 citations were reported in 94 articles out of which 33.16 percent were having web citations. Of web citations, 62.15 percent of URLs were accessible at the time of testing and the remaining 37.85 percent of URLs were not accessible. HTTP error message 404 “page not found’’ was the irresistible error message appeared and represented 51.22 percent of all HTTP error messages. Average half-life of URLs was estimated to be 4.62 years. There was no association found between path depth and decay of URLs. Articles accessed from domain .org, .net and .co/.com were found more alive than other domains