n. (also link-rot) the disassociation between web addresses and their contentDowling 2001, 36Across the Internet, the rate at which once-valid links start pointing at nonexistent addresses—a process called “link rot”—is as high as 16 percent in six months.Russell and Kane 2008, 421The fourth section discusses some efforts to address the problem of “link rot” by creating archives of web sites, and it describes the way we tested the completeness of the archive.Rhodes 2010, 581Link rot refers to the loss or removal of content at a particular Uniform Resource Locator (URL) over time.Rhodes 2010, 585Despite our inability to pinpoint the average time it takes for a web resource to disappear from its URL, or even the overall extent of link rot within the online universe, we know that the phenomenon of link rot is indeed pervasive, and it has been well documented by studies from a variety of disciplines.Chant 2013The problem of “link rot”—when a link to a citation in a document or court case posted online no longer directs users to a valid page—and “reference rot”—when a citation links to a page that still exists but no longer hosts the information cited—is growing more serious as information about court cases and legal decisions is increasingly stored and accessed online.Tyler and McNeil 2013, 617Most recently, two researchers at the University of Nebraska, John Markwell and David W. Brooks investigated on a monthly basis, from August 2000 to May 2002, the incidence of “link rot” in the 515 hyper-links contained in the on-line materials of three graduate-level biochemistry courses created in August of 2000.Leetaru, Perkins, and Rewerts 2014This demonstrates the tremendous link rot that plagues the web and the critical role that the Internet Archive plays in preserving the web.Klein et al. 2014, 2Link rot is known to all web users as they are regularly confronted with unhelpful “404 Not Found” error messages.Klein et al. 2014, 15The three corpora exhibit a trend found in all link rot studies to date: link rot manifests itself increasingly as links age. However, the extent to which the corpora suffer from link rot is distinct. Inarguably, over time, arXiv exhibits the lowest link rot ratio, and maintains an impressively low rate even for the oldest publication years. And, when discounting the publication years prior to 2003 because PMC hardly contains any URI references then, the link rot ratio for Elsevier is significantly worse than that for PMC.Burton 2015, 180, fn. 121The website, and now database, is still live although many of the links are broken due to link-rot.Van de Sompel and Nelson 2015This Robust Link approach is aimed at avoiding link rot and content drift, and results from the Mellon-funded Hiberlink project.Mayernik, Phillips, and Nienhouse 2016In addition, all web-based relationship schemas will face the same link-rot issues that exist throughout the web.Kelly 2017, 13Many archives post their finding aids online using simple web links that are prone to domain name moves and link rot, and a lack of persistent URLs may prove to be a hindrance to many archives trying to track direct links to their finding aids.Taylor 2017, 3The many, comparatively benign reasons for link rot have been lately compounded by more conspicuous, deliberate efforts to erase Web information, which have provoked anxiety about the prospect of more ambitious deletions.Dulin and Ziegler 2017A study we conducted in 2013 revealed that, in the legal field, 50% of United States Supreme Court cases and 70% of a selected ten year span of law review articles with web citations suffered from link rot. . . . More recently, a detailed study outside of the legal field confirmed the same; a roughly 70% level of link rot in a broad corpus of science, technology, and medicine articles published between 1997 and 2012.
