The use of Internet or Web citations in professional literature is growing. This new trend brings with it the problems of defunct Web sites, links that do not work, and documents that are altered from the originally cited material. Web documents cited by authors can also simply disappear. A recent study found that 12% of Web citations were already inaccessible within 2 days of the articles being listed on PubMed. In other work, nearly 28% of documents cited from Web locations could not be found, either through direct link or an Internet search using key terms.

One method that can be used by authors to ensure that referenced Web documents are more easily found is to list the Web document's digital object identifier (DOI) number, along with other retrieval information. The DOI is a unique alphanumeric string that provides a link to the content on the Internet. Because this is useful only for documents that have a DOI number and does not guarantee that the document will not be removed from the Web, another very promising method for long-term preservation of an Internet reference is to permanently archive the material.

An archiving system currently used by hundreds of authors and journals is WebCite(R) (http://www.webcite.org). By entering only an e-mail address and the URL of the material you wish to archive, an author can save the original Web document and preserve it for future reference. WebCite provides a number corresponding to the location of the archived material, and this number is then included in retrieval information for the corresponding citation in the author's manuscript. The archiving process is free to authors, who are encouraged to archive all of their Internet references before submitting manuscripts for publication.

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