What If Law Journal Citations Included Digital Object Identifiers?: A Snapshot of Major Law Journals

Keele, Benjamin J. What If Law Journal Citations Included Digital Object Identifiers?: A Snapshot of Major Law Journals., 2010 [Preprint]

[img]
Preview
PDF
CodexSSRN.pdf

Download (231kB) | Preview

English abstract

Prevailing citation practice in law journals is to use uniform resource locators (URLs) when citing electronic sources. Digital object identifiers (DOIs) provide a more reliable and robust mechanism for citing digital, scholarly articles. This study examines to what extent DOIs exist but are not used in law journal citations. Citations to scholarly articles from twenty-five randomly-selected articles appearing in the 2008-2009 volumes of four major law journals (Harvard Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and University of Pennsylvania Law Review) were checked for existing DOIs using CrossRef's Simple Text Query form. This resulted in 394 citations that could have had DOIs, but did not. This non-trivial number suggests that law journal editors and librarians should consider adding DOIs to citations. For journals that publish exclusively online or are interdisciplinary, assigning DOIs to their own articles may be a prudent measure to better ensure long-term digital access and citation by scholars in other fields.

Item type: Preprint
Keywords: digital object identifier, link rot, legal citation
Subjects: B. Information use and sociology of information > BG. Information dissemination and diffusion.
H. Information sources, supports, channels. > HP. e-resources.
Depositing user: Benjamin J. Keele
Date deposited: 24 Mar 2010
Last modified: 02 Oct 2014 12:16
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10760/14393

References

Sarah Rhodes, “Preserving Born-Digital Legal Materials...Where to Start?,” Populism, entry posted January 10, 2010, http://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/2010/01/10/preserving-born-digital-legal-materials/ [accessed March 18, 2010]

Mary Rumsey, “Runaway Train: Problems of Permanence, Accessibility, and Stability in the Use of Web Sources in Law Review Citations,” Law Library Journal 94 (2002), http://www.aallnet.org/products/pub_llj_v94n01/2002-02.pdf [accessed March 18, 2010].

CrossRef, “40 Million CrossRef DOIs Preserve the Record of Scholarship,” CrossRef, February 5, 2010, http://www.crossref.org/01company/pr/news020210.html [accessed March 18, 2010].

E. Dana Neacsu, “Legal Scholarship and Digital Publishing: Has Anything Changed in the Way We Do Legal Research?,” Legal Reference Services Quarterly 21, no. 2 & 3 (March 2002): 105-122 [doi: 10.1300/J113v21n02_06].

Simon Canick, “Availability of Works Cited in Recent Law Review Articles on LEXIS, Westlaw, the Internet, and Other Databases,” Legal Reference Services Quarterly 21, no. 2 & 3 (March 2002): 55-67 [doi: 10.1300/J113v21n02_03].

Helane Davis, “Keeping Validity in Cite: Web Resources Cited in Select Washington Law Reviews, 2001-03,” Law Library Journal 98 (2006), http://www.aallnet.org/products/pub_llj_v98n04/2006-38.pdf [accessed March 18, 2010].

Vincent Lariviére et al., “The Place of Serials in Referencing Practices: Comparing Natural

Sciences and Engineering with Social Sciences and Humanities,” Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology 57, no. 8 (April 7, 2006): 997-1004 [doi: 10.1002/asi.20349].

Susan Lyons, “Persistent Identification of Electronic Documents and the Future of Footnotes,” Library Law Journal 97 (2005), http://www.aallnet.org/products/pub_llj_v97n04/2005-42.pdf [accessed March 18, 2010].

International DOI Foundation, The DOI Handbook, 4.4.1 ed. [Oxford: International DOI Foundation, 2006] [doi: 10.1000/186]

Amy Brand, “CROSSREF: From Linking to Cross-Provider Search,” Serials Librarian 50, no. 1 & 2 (May 2006): 119-124 [doi: 10.1300/J123v50n01_11].

American Psychological Association, Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 6th ed. [Washington, DC: American Psychological Assocation, 2010].

Columbia Law Review et al., eds. The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, 18th ed. (Cambridge: Harvard Law Review Association, 2005].

Association of Legal Writing Directors and Darby Dickerson, ALWD Citation Manual: A Professional System of Citation, 3rd ed. [New York: Aspen Publishers, 2006].

CrossRef, “Simple Text Query Version 1.3,” http://www.crossref.org/SimpleTextQuery/ [accessed March 18, 2010].

Michael Spinella, “JSTOR and the Changing Digital Landscape,“ Interlending & Document Supply 36, no. 2 (2008): 79-85 [doi: 10.1108/02641610810878549].

CrossRef, “Publisher Fees,” http://www.crossref.org/02publishers/20pub_fees.html [accessed March 18, 2010].

Robert P. Dellavalle, et al., “Going, Going, Gone: Lost Internet References,” Science 302, no. 5646 (October 31, 2003): 787-788 [doi: 10.1126/science.1088234].

Mikhail Koulikov, “Indexing and Full-Text Coverage of Law Review Articles in Nonlegal Databases:An Initial Study,” Law Library Journal 102 (2010), http://www.aallnet.org/products/pub_llj_v102n01/2010-02.pdf [accessed March 18, 2010].


Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item
http://eprints.rclis.org/14393/
eprints.rclis.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2022-27
40475
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:3UOGCEL2KOAZBWNQZRSOD7V2OFLEEYO6
<urn:uuid:a8c1a7e5-dddd-4f63-8278-e93ef904f45b>
2022-07-02T07:44:01Z
143.225.172.196
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:2O76IDHHYWJGTZJDWFRLV7MXZG2LW7M6
<urn:uuid:9c4ee8d1-8531-4ddc-9b3c-1d0a38a28995>
http://eprints.rclis.org/14393/
response
<urn:uuid:777416be-34c1-49af-a506-1459333d5be9>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2022-27
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for June/July 2022
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-246
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.3-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/