Dead Science: Most Resources Linked in Biomedical Articles Disappear in Eight Years

Tong Zeng, Alain Shema, Daniel E. Acuna

Research output: Chapter in Book/Entry/PoemConference contribution

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

Scientific progress critically depends on disseminating analytic pipelines and datasets that make results reproducible and replicable. Increasingly, researchers make resources available for wider reuse and embed links to them in their published manuscripts. Previous research has shown that these resources become unavailable over time but the extent and causes of this problem in open access publications has not been explored well. By using 1.9 million articles from PubMed Open Access, we estimate that half of all resources become unavailable after 8 years. We find that the number of times a resource has been used, the international (int) and organization (org) domain suffixes, and the number of affiliations are positively related to resources being available. In contrast, we found that the length of the URL, Indian (in), European Union (eu), and Chinese (cn) domain suffixes, and abstract length are negatively related to resources being available. Our results contribute to our understanding of resource sharing in science and provide some guidance to solve resource decay.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationInformation in Contemporary Society - 14th International Conference, iConference 2019, Proceedings
EditorsCaitlin Christian-Lamb, Natalie Greene Taylor, Michelle H. Martin, Bonnie Nardi
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages170-176
Number of pages7
ISBN (Print)9783030157418
DOIs
StatePublished - 2019
Event14th International Conference on Information in Contemporary Society, iConference 2019 - Washington, United States
Duration: Mar 31 2019Apr 3 2019

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume11420 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference14th International Conference on Information in Contemporary Society, iConference 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityWashington
Period3/31/194/3/19

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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