How to read a page that is gone
One in five science, technology and medicine articles cannot be checked against the web pages they cite. Here is how to retrieve a page that has vanished.
We have not finished checking this source. No judgement either way. how we score evidence
Caveat on this rating: The denominator is the whole caveat and it is stated in the body rather than hidden here. The paper's own words: "We find one out of five STM articles suffering from reference rot" and "When only considering STM articles that contain references to web resources, this fraction increases to seven out of ten." One in five is of ALL science, technology and medicine articles in their corpus - not of all scholarship, and not of web references. Dropping the denominator is the standard misquotation of this paper and would make our own figure the kind of claim this trail exists to warn about. The figure describes scholarly citation, not government websites; it is offered as context for why link rot is normal, never as a measurement of federal pages.
This is not special to health agencies. One in five science, technology and medicine articles already cannot be checked against the web pages they cite.
Significant findings
Researchers measured what they named reference rot. That means a cited web page that has vanished, or changed into something else.
One in five of those articles suffers from it.
The denominator matters, because this figure gets misquoted constantly. It is one in five of all the articles studied. Counting only articles that actually cite web pages, it is seven in ten.
So a dead government link is not usually a scandal. It is the ordinary condition of the web, arriving at documents that happen to matter a great deal.
Worth asking
Here is the useful part, and it takes about ten seconds.
Paste any dead URL into web.archive.org. It will show you every date that page was saved. Pick a capture from before it vanished, and read the original.
Do that once and the record stops disappearing on you.
Source
Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot — Klein M, Van de Sompel H, Sanderson R, Shankar H, Balakireva L, Zhou K, Tobin R (2014)
Read the source: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115253
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0115253
How this was scored
- Study design
- not recorded
- Funding
- not recorded
- Published in
- not recorded
- Sample size
- not recorded
- Preregistered
- not recorded
- Conflicts disclosed
- not recorded
- Independent of proponent
- not recorded
- Retracted
- No
We have not finished checking this source, so there is no scoring to show yet. “We have not checked this yet” and “this is disputed” are different statements, so no scored band is shown rather than a low one.
Read the full scoring rubric, including what it can't tell you.
Published August 31, 2026.
Questions
How strong is the evidence behind this?
Resolv rates this source "not yet assessed". We have not finished checking this source. No judgement either way. One caveat travels with that badge: The denominator is the whole caveat and it is stated in the body rather than hidden here. The paper's own words: "We find one out of five STM articles suffering from reference rot" and "When only considering STM articles that contain references to web resources, this fraction increases to seven out of ten." One in five is of ALL science, technology and medicine articles in their corpus - not of all scholarship, and not of web references. Dropping the denominator is the standard misquotation of this paper and would make our own figure the kind of claim this trail exists to warn about. The figure describes scholarly citation, not government websites; it is offered as context for why link rot is normal, never as a measurement of federal pages. The score is calculated from recorded facts about the source — study design, funding, publication venue, sample size, preregistration — not typed in by an editor.
What is the source for this?
Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot — Klein M, Van de Sompel H, Sanderson R, Shankar H, Balakireva L, Zhou K, Tobin R (2014). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0115253. The full source is linked on this page so you can read it yourself.
Is this medical advice?
This is information to bring to your prescriber, not medical advice and not a reason to change anything on your own. Nothing here is an instruction to stop or reduce a medication. If you are in crisis, call or text 988.
This is information to bring to your prescriber, not medical advice and not a reason to change anything on your own. Nothing here is an instruction to stop or reduce a medication. If you are in crisis, call or text 988.