RSS Feeds
Scholarship Erosion
- Robert G. Badgett, MD, Associate Editor;
- Michael Berkwits, MD, MSCE, Deputy Editor; and
- Cynthia Mulrow, MD, MSc, Deputy Editor
IN RESPONSE:
Annals currently allows references to Web sites as long as authors provide the URL and the date on which the URL was accessed. Our production editors check all URLs during editing and before the journal becomes publicly accessible on the Web to ensure that the URLs are valid. If they are not, we ask the authors to provide an updated link or to remove the reference to the link.
We recognize that Web sites may contain unvetted or invalid information and that links to online material within Web sites (including Web sites of established journals) may have short shelf lives (1-5). We think, however, that a policy of disallowing Web references and links is too restrictive, and we agree with Dr. Sotos that journals do not have the resources to routinely check information on Web sites or to routinely monitor the status of links after publication. That said, we make the following recommendations to authors:
-
Avoid citing a Web site with content that would be considered unscholarly if found in print.
-
Avoid using an online reference if a more scholarly print reference is available.
-
Archive (preferably in a durable governmental or institutional archive) cited Web pages, and, if possible, archive free material from e-journals and other Web-based scholarly materials that you might cite in the future if that material is not published in a journal with an established archiving process.
We hope that these recommendations will help improve the transparency of source references and will facilitate access to similar versions of those references without undermining authors' freedom to cite sources in the scholarly areas that they presumably know best. We will routinely review these recommendations as reference standards and electronic archives evolve.
Article and Author Information
-
Potential Financial Conflicts of Interest: None disclosed.
