Harvard Law Review — >70% of URL citations 1996-2012 no longer resolve

A study of legal scholarship found that more than 70% of URLs cited across a sample drawn from the Harvard Law Review and two other Harvard journals between 1996 and 2012 no longer resolve to the originally cited content (S-0054).

The case is empirical input for C-0023, with two specific properties that strengthen the argument:

1. The corpus is high-prestige. Harvard Law Review is among the most-cited law publications. The 70% rot rate among its citations indicates that web-citation reliability does not improve at the upper end of the prestige distribution.
2. The 1996-2012 timeframe is generous. Citations from 2012 had only a few years to rot; citations from 1996 had nearly two decades. The aggregate of 70% rot across a 16-year span tracks the same decay curve as Pew's findings (E-0038) but applied to specifically scholarly citations.

Legal scholarship has responded with the perma.cc service (Harvard LIL) which content-addresses cited URLs at the time of citation. The architectural model — content-address at the moment of use — is exactly the Tier 3 fix the paper recommends generalizing across the scholarly record.