Web citation analysis of Library and Information Science and Communication and Media Studies journals : A comparative study

The present study examines the availability of web citations in scholarly journals of Library and Information Science and Communication and Media Studies. The journals were selected based on their high impact factor published between 2008 and 2017. A PHP script was used to crawl the Uniform Resource Locators collected from the references. A total of 12,251 articles were downloaded and 5,55,428 references were extracted. A total of 1,02,718 URLs were checked for their availability. Further, the lexical features of URL like file extension, path depth, character length and the top-level domain were determined. The research findings indicated that the percentage of web citations in articles has been continuously increased from 2008 to 2017 in both disciplines. The result of the accessibility check indicated that more number of URLs in CMS journal articles were accessible than in LIS journal articles. The majority of errors in both the disciplines were due to HTTP 404 error code (Not found error). The findings of the study will be helpful to authors, publishers and editorial staff to ensure that web citations will be accessible in future.