The Problem of Footnotes in a Digital Age

HistoryToday has an interesting article about the problem of footnotes related especially to online documents using permalinks here. According to the article, 

Digital library researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory found in a survey of three and a half million scholarly articles from scientific journals between 1997 and 2012 that one in five links provided in the footnotes suffered from ‘reference rot.’ Another survey, this time of law and policy publications, revealed that after six years nearly half of URLs cited had become inaccessible.

An American study of two leading history journals found that in articles published seven years earlier, 38 percent of web citations were dead.