Content referenced in scholarly articles is drifting, with negative effects on the integrity of the scholarly record

In their 2015 post, Martin Klein and Herbert Van de Sompel reported on the beginnings of an investigation into ‘reference rot’ in scholarly articles. This term incorporated ‘link rot’, whereby referenced web-at-large resources vanished from the web altogether, and ‘content drift’, whereby a resource’s content changed over time to such an extent as to cease to be representative of that originally referenced. Results from the initial study found that between 13% and 22% of references suffered from link rot. Here, Klein and Van de Sompel describe the findings of a more recent study assessing content drift. Results show as much as 75% of referenced content had changed to some degree in just three years, raising significant concerns over the integrity of the scholarly record. However, increased adoption of ‘robust links’ offers a viable solution to this problem.