Web Citation Analysis on Journal of Travel Research: A Study

Abstract

A substantial amount of research has focused on the persistence or availability of Web citations. The present study  analyzes Web citation distributions. Web citations are defined as the mentions of the URLs of Web pages (Web  resources) as references in academic papers. The present paper primarily focuses on the analysis of the URLs of Web  citations. Initially, all issues of the Journal of Travel Research published during 2012 to 2021 were downloaded  directly from their publisher websites. Afterwards, all the journals' citations in either print or Web formats were  calculated manually. Then, availability and/or decay of individual cited URLs were examined in the Web  environments. Research findings indicated that, a total of 2939 URLs cited in the 740 articles were examined. The  percentage of URLs increased from 58 percent in 2012 to 90 percent in 2021. The study found that 40 percent of  URLs were not accessible at the time of testing and the remaining 60 per-cent of URLs were accessible. The HTTP  404 error message – ‘‘file not found’’ was the overwhelming message encountered and represented 53.29 percent of  all HTTP error messages. The study also noticed that the average half-life of URLs of missing URLs was estimated  to be 4.94 years.