WebCite

WebCite is a service that archives web pages on demand. Authors can subsequently cite the archived web pages through WebCite, in addition to citing the original URL of the web page. Readers are able to retrieve the archived web pages indefinitely, without regard to whether the original web page is revised or removed (so-called link rot). Such archiving is especially important in the academic context. WebCite is at present a non-profit consortium supported by publishers and editors, and it can be used by individual authors and readers without charge.

Rather than relying on a web crawler which archives pages in a "random" fashion, WebCite users who want to cite web pages in a scholarly article can initiate the archiving process. They then cite — instead of or in addition to the original URL — a WebCite address, with an identifier that specifies a snapshot of the contents of the particular page they meant to cite.

One may archive all types of web content, including HTML web pages, PDF files, style sheets, JavaScript and digital images. WebCite also archives metadata about the collected resources such as access time, MIME type, and content length. This metadata is useful in establishing the authenticity and provenance of the archived collection.

1 History
2 Process
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

History

Conceived in 1997, WebCite was publicly described the following year when an article on Internet quality control declared that such a service could also measure the citation impact of web pages.^[1] In the same year, a pilot service was set up at the address webcite.net (see archived screenshots of that service at the Internet Archive). Shortly thereafter, Google and the Internet Archive entered the market, seemingly obviating the need for a service like WebCite.

The WebCite idea was revived in 2003, when a study published in the journal Science concluded that no appropriate and agreed-on archiving solution yet existed for publishing.^[2] Neither the Internet Archive nor Google allows for “on-demand” archiving by authors, and they do not have interfaces to scholarly journals and publishers to automate the archiving of cited links. By 2008, over 200 journals had begun routinely using WebCite.^[3]

Process

WebCite allows on-demand prospective archiving. It is not crawler-based; pages are only archived if the citing author or publisher requests it. No cached copy will appear in a WebCite search unless the author or another person has specifically cached it beforehand.

To initiate the caching and archiving of a page, an author may use WebCite's "archive" menu option or create a WebCite bookmarklet that will allow web surfers to cache pages just by clicking a button in their bookmarks folder.

One can retrieve or cite archived pages through a transparent format such as

http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=URL&date=DATE

where URL is the URL that was archived, and DATE indicates the caching date. For example,

http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FMain_Page&date=2008-03-04

or the alternate short form http://www.webcitation.org/5W56XTY5h retrieves an archived copy of the URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page that is closest to the date of March 4, 2008.