Link rot in LIS literature: a 20-year study of web citation decay, recovery and preservation challenges

Purpose Web citations are essential for scholarly integrity, but their reliability is threatened by link rot and content drift. Fields like Library and Information Science (LIS), which depend heavily on web references, face significant challenges in preserving digital citations. This longitudinal study (2005–2025) aims to investigate the decay and recovery of web citations in LIS journals, offering actionable solutions to preserve digital scholarship. Design/methodology/approach This 20-year longitudinal study employed a quantitative approach to examine web citation decay in LIS literature. We analyzed 2,886 citations from 608 articles published in four leading journals. Findings Three key findings emerged from the analysis. First, web citations are now decaying exponentially, with accessibility dropping from 87% for citations 0–5 years old to 38% for those over 10 years old. Furthermore, permanent link rot has tripled from 5% in 2012 to 15% in 2025. Second, preservation outcomes vary dramatically by domain (e.g. .edu domains show 93% accessibility versus 42% for .com domains) and content format (e.g. PDFs maintain 92% accessibility compared to 41% for database-driven content). Third, although recovery tools have improved (the Wayback Machine’s success rate increased by 171%), their benefits are offset by new challenges such as failures caused by dynamic content, which now account for 19% of all failures. The study advocates for mandatory archiving protocols and persistent identifiers to safeguard scholarly records, highlighting the urgent need for systemic reforms. Originality/value This study offers three key innovations: (1) It provides the first longitudinal evidence that link rot is accelerating despite improvements in archiving tools, thereby revealing a paradox in preservation efforts; (2) it identifies dynamic content as a significant new error category, accounting for 19% of failures; (3) it demonstrates a phenomenon of “preservation resistance” in 15% of citations that are unrecoverable by any method. These findings redefine the challenges of modern link rot.