BACK TO THE ORIGINAL: A GLANCE INCIDENCES OF WEB CITATIONS IN SOUTH AFRICAN ELECTRONIC LAW JOURNALS FROM 2005 TO 2012

Transcription

1 BACK TO THE ORIGINAL: A GLANCE INCIDENCES OF WEB CITATIONS IN SOUTH AFRICAN ELECTRONIC LAW JOURNALS FROM 2005 TO 2012 Paper presented at LIASA Annual Conference held at Cape Town International Convention Centre September 2013 By DR S.T. Bopape University of Limpopo

2 PAPER OUTLINE Introduction Problem statement Literature review Method and materials Results and findings Discussion of results Conclusion

3 INTRODUCTION Primary and secondary sources in law are today available in electronic format through the Internet Court decisions, legislation, regulations, commentaries, law journal articles, and case notes can be obtained free of charge or through database subscriptions A simple Google search can allow access to legal documents that were not accessible when searching from printed resources (Whiteman, 2010) Therefore, legal research is today conducted mostly online

4 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM The more legal research is conducted online, it is reasonable to conclude that there will be a corresponding increase in citations to the Internet in legal publications produced This study, therefore, seeks to measure the extent to which online legal information is used in scholarly communication in the legal field With the dominance and prevalence of legal information on the Internet, it is essential to determine the extent to which they are used by legal researchers in South African legal periodicals Such study will assist in determining the impact of Internet information on scholarly communication in law and will guide law librarians in making collection development decisions for electronic materials

5 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM (CONT.) Despite the prevalence of legal information on the Internet, it appears there is no study that was undertaken in South Africa to look into how well legal researchers are using information obtained from the Internet This paper therefore, seeks to provoke research into the extent to which legal researchers use online information for scholarly communication in law The specific aim of this study is to count incidences or occurrences of Internet citations in the research articles published in South African legal journals between 2005 and 2012 Electronic Legal periodicals that are indexed in the SA e - publication law collection database were main focus of this study

6 LITERATURE REVIEW One way of measuring the extent to which published information is used, is to count a number of times it is cited(adriaanse & Rensleigh, 2011). Citation counts are used to measure the quality of research outputs This entails that the more the papers by a particular researcher are cited, the more the quality of those papers grows In law, citation counts were used to assess the judicial influence and prestige of court judges (Vreeland, 2000). If the cases and opinions authored by a particular court judge are cited in the later cases, the more judicial influence and prestige of that particular judge grows (Smyth, 2001).

7 LITERATURE REVIEW (CONT.) Citations to the Web resources have been studied since as early as the mid-1990 (Mardani, 2012). Studies conducted with regards to the Web citations in the legal field concentrated much on whether the Web addresses cited would still lead to the documents that were linked to those addresses after a particular period Most of these studies found that those links either disappear or change over time (Mardani 2012; Davis, 2006; Rumsey, 2002).

8 LITERATURE REVIEW (CONT.) Some studies also concentrated on incidences of Web citations in legal court opinions, judgments and decisions (Wilkerson, 2006; Ching, 2007). These studies found that the overall number of Internet citations were low, despite the ever-increasing amounts of legal information on the Internet. The current study concentrated more on the occurrences of Internet citation in S.A. electronic legal periodicals from 2005 to 2012 This might similar to the study conducted by Canick (2002), where some selected legal articles were examined to determine the proportion of cited Web resources in Lexis and Westlaw databases

9 METHOD AND MATERIALS Web information has specific locators such as URL s and domain names URL s are standards formats for identifying locations to the Internet URL s also have domain names, which are unique names that identify the Internet site They fall under either of the following categories: - -.com: for commercial organizations -.edu: for educational institutions -.gov: for government -.net: for networking organizations -.org. for non-profit organizations These domain names are referred to as top -level domain names and are regarded as the resources from which most of the information can be obtained(wilkerson, 2006) These five were specifically chosen because they are amongst the first TLD on the Internet

10 METHOD AND MATERIALS The other identifiers used represented the names of unreported law reports, namely jol and jdr domains. jol means judgments online and is hosted by LexisNexis and jdr means Juta Daily Reports and was previously hosted by SABINET. Unreported cases are primary authority and most of them can only be found through the Internet. The numbers were compiled by running a search for each domain name from 2005 to 2012 in the SA e -publications law collection database in January 2013

11 METHODS AND MATERIALS (CONT.) The searches were conducted in such a way that they can appear anywhere in the articles because there was no provision for searching by footnotes, bibliography or references in the specified database. Each domain was searched in such a way that it was preceded by a dot to ensure that they do not entail something different. The number of hits for each domain name for each year was tabulated and then transported to an Excel spread sheet so that it could be analyzed.

12 RESULTS The total number of domain names found in the database was This constitutes 34% of the articles indexed in the SA e- publications law collection database from 2005 to The largest number of Web citation incidences occurred in 2008 with 696 hits, and the lowest number of hits in 2012, with 169 occurrences. The following table represent the pattern of the use of domain names in S.A. law journal articles over a period of eight years

13 TABLE 1 T Total (%).com (46%).edu (3%).gov (9%).net (26%).org (6%).jdr (6%).jol (7%) Total 277 (8%) 348 (10%) 549 (16%) 696 (20%) 559 (16%) 473 (13%) 426 (12%) 169 (5%) 3497 (100%)

14 INCREASE AND DECREASE The results also show that the Internet occurrences were low in 2005 and grew steadily in 2006 and 2007 to a point where it doubled in After that Web citation incidences started decreasing from 2009 to The following figure depicts how Internet domain names incidences increased from 2005 to 2008 and decreased from 2009 to 2012

15 FIGURE 1

16 DOMAIN NAMES The domain name that appears most frequently in the articles is the com with 1623 incidences followed by net with 905 occurrences. The lowest number of hits was jdr and edu with 114 and 90 incidences respectively. Figure depicts the frequency of occurrences of domain names in a form of a pie chart

17 DOMAIN NAME INCIDENCES PIE CHART

18 DISCUSSION OF RESULTS Generally the usage of Internet resources in SA legal periodicals from 2005 to 2012 is relatively low, and this can be attributed to a number of reasons:- - Not all legal information are yet available online, in particular old legal materials - Some legal researchers might be attached to libraries that have no access fee-based electronic databases - The pdf versions found from the Internet look exactly the same as in the printed sources - Online materials are not always accurate and authenticated - Some online citations lack permanence (link decay or link rot) - Lack of standards for citing online legal information - Some citation rules dictate that online legal information should always be verified by checking the availability of the printed material

19 DISCUSSION OF RESULTS (CONT.) The majority of Web resources that were being cited were those that are associated with the commercial organizations or the com domain. Perhaps this is because materials from commercial resources are also available commercial publishers and freely through legal information institutes such as SAFLII and search engines such as Lawcrawler, Findlaw, Catalaw etc. The com domain accounts for 74% of the registered domain names on the Internet (Royal Pingdom Blog, 2012). It was also expected that a large number of citation would be the ones related to jol and jdr domain names as primary legal authority and Org and gov domain names as the resources from which legal information can be found, but they also appear in small number.

20 CONCLUSION Legal scholarship will has long been and will continue to be dominated by print materials (Davis, 2006). Future research needs to be conducted to confirm or refute this claim. The methods used in this study have some limitations. For instance, some of the domains names have been left out, cognisant of the pace at which the Internet is evolving. Future studies using different methods can still be conducted