Short URLs in Academic Citations?

Catherine White recently brought this question to my attention, as a result of her using Bit.ly links in a citation for an academic paper she’s working on:

A bit off topic (my nod to the social ‘rules’ of thesis-post blog replies ;-) if such exist. I suppose by this I am indicating my ‘correct’ socialization, but begging your indulgence for an exception) but is there a citation style that allows bit.ly-encoded URLs? To me, it still seems a bit odd to see these in a medium where they provide little benefit. Are they regarded as a permanent method to reference the sources? Just curious.

RonM on July 5th, 2010 at 12:20 pm

Her response:

RonM, thank you for your comment. I chose bit.ly simply because the urls were really long and it just made my footnotes look neater on the page. Original draft was in LaTeX. I spoke to Stowe Boyd earlier this week and he told me bit.ly links are all being archived and are permanent – right Stowe?

cathcw on July 9th, 2010 at 10:52 am

My feeling is that it should be acceptable to use shortened URLs in citations. A few pros:

Descriptiveness — They are not necessarily any less descriptive. Consider Catharine’s post, which has the illuminating  URL of “http://www.justwhitenoise.com/?p=1059”. In fact some shorteners let you provide a distinctive name in the URL, like “http://sto.ly/noisyidiotdilemma”.

Analytics — Shorteners often have some click count capabilities, or maybe even stronger analytics, so the author can track references to the articles they cite, which is simply not possible otherwise.

Shortness — As Catharine points out, shortened URLs are short, which is meaningful on the printed page just as it is in Twitter. Incredibly annoying URLs — like the ones created by Google maps — simply have to be shortened to be used productively.

And a few cons:

Domain Obscurity — If the original article was posted at the New York Times, that bit of information is lost if it winds up as a Bit.ly link. However, many publishers like the New York Times are providing their own URL shorteners, so a link like “http://nyti.ms/a6hO6J” retains that domain clarity, however. Although in this case, the author loses the analytics.

URL Shortener Shutdown — There is always the possibility that a URL shortener service could cease operations. The NY Times shut down NYTUrl.com after ‘abuses’ by users, and as a result, any URLs created by that service are now unusable.

In 2009, I was involved in the formation of 301Works.org, a non-profit dedicated to ‘backstopping’ URLs, and where I serve as director. The idea is that participating URL shortener companies — which includes Bit.ly, and many others — will back up their URL mappings — the pairs of long and short URLs — so that if they decide to shut down the service 301Works.org (a project of the Internet Archive) can step in and provide the redirection for users.

My recommendation is that anyone planning to use a shortened URL in a permanent way, as in the citation of a paper, might want to a/ retain the long version of the URL, and b/ make sure the URL shortener service is a member of 301Works.org.

In the final analysis, all URLs are impermanent. Magazines and periodicals may go out of business, or change their URL structure. Blogger can rehost their blogs, changing their URLs. Or pages can simply be deleted. Avoiding short URLs would not get away from this fundamental law of the web.

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