Web Citation Analysis on Journal of Travel Research: A Study

Abstract

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.