Formally citing the Web

How do authors refer to Web‐based information sources in their formal scientific publications? It is not yet well known how scientists and scholars actually include new types of information sources, available through the new media, in their published work. This article reports on a comparative study of the lists of references in 38 scientific journals in five different scientific and social scientific fields. The fields are sociology, library and information science, biochemistry and biotechnology, neuroscience, and the mathematics of computing. As is well known, references, citations, and hyperlinks play different roles in academic publishing and communication. Our study focuses on hyperlinks as attributes of references in formal scholarly publications. The study developed and applied a method to analyze the differential roles of publishing media in the analysis of scientific and scholarly literature references. The present secondary databases that include reference and citation data (the Web of Science) cannot be used for this type of research. By the automated processing and analysis of the full text of scientific and scholarly articles, we were able to extract the references and hyperlinks contained in these references in relation to other features of the scientific and scholarly literature. Our findings show that hyperlinking references are indeed, as expected, abundantly present in the formal literature. They also tend to cite more recent literature than the average reference. The large majority of the references are to Web instances of traditional scientific journals. Other types of Web‐based information sources are less well represented in the lists of references, except in the case of pure e‐journals. We conclude that this can be explained by taking the role of the publisher into account. Indeed, it seems that the shift from print‐based to electronic publishing has created new roles for the publisher. By shaping the way scientific references are hyperlinking to other information sources, the publisher may have a large impact on the availability of scientific and scholarly information.