Reference Rot: An Emerging Threat to Transparency in Political Science

Transparency of research is a large concern in political science, and the practice of publishing links to datasets and other online resources is one of the main methods by which political scientists promote transparency. But the method cannot work if the links don’t, and very often, they don’t. We show that most of the URLs ever published in the American Political Science Review no longer work as intended. The problem is severe in recent as well as in older articles; for example, more than one-fourth of links published in the APSR in 2013 were broken by the end of 2014. We conclude that “reference rot” limits the transparency and reproducibility of political science research. We also describe practices that scholars can adopt to combat the problem: when possible, they should archive data in trustworthy repositories, use links that incorporate persistent digital identifiers, and create archival versions of the webpages to which they link.

研究透明度是政治学领域的核心关切之一，公开数据集与其他在线资源链接的做法，是政治学研究者提升研究透明度的主要途径之一。但倘若链接失效，该手段便无法发挥应有作用，而此类失效情况实则屡见不鲜。本研究发现，《美国政治学评论》（American Political Science Review，简称APSR）刊载过的绝大多数统一资源定位符（URL）均无法按预期正常访问。该问题在新旧刊载文章中均十分严重：例如，2013年刊载于APSR的链接中，超过四分之一在2014年末便已失效。本研究据此认为，链接腐坏（reference rot）问题制约了政治学研究的透明度与可重复性。此外，本研究还提出了研究者可用于应对该问题的实践方案：在条件允许的情况下，研究者应将数据存档于可信的学术数据仓储库中，使用包含持久数字标识符的链接，并为所链接的网页创建存档副本。