Citation of On-line Electronic Documents by Journals of the Communication Field

Abstract

Internet use to publish scientific documents has grown considerably in the last few years. This paper aims to verify whether the links to electronic online documents cited in papers published in Brazilian scientific journals in the communication field can be used to retrieve these documents. This is a bibliometric study in which the citation analysis technique is utilized to classify the on-line electronic references analised. The authors researched the papers published in 2002 and 2003 in the following journals: PCLA, Ciberlegenda, Revista FAMECOS and Revista Brasileira de Ciências da Comunicação, totaling 23 issues. One hundred and nineteen on-line electronic documents were tested, out of which 63 (52,9%) were retrieved and 56 (47,1%) could not be reached. The conclusion is that a link to an on-line electronic document is not always sufficient to locate this document on the web, thus raising the question whether the web is a reliable medium to store scientific information.