Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations
24 Pages Posted: 23 Sep 2013 Last revised: 15 Feb 2014
Date Written: October 1, 2013
Abstract
We document a serious problem of reference rot: more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs found within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information.
Given that, we propose a solution for authors and editors of new scholarship that involves libraries undertaking the distributed, long-term preservation of link contents.
Keywords: URLs, Internet, Link Rot, Reference Rot, Archiving Preservation
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Jonathan Zittrain (Contact Author)
Harvard Law School and Harvard Kennedy School of Government ( email )
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States
Harvard University - Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics ( email )
124 Mount Auburn Street
Suite 520N
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States
