Detailed guides to painful problems, treatments & more

Hundreds of old bibliography links fixed

 •  • by Paul Ingraham
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Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.

I just finally completed an absurdly tedious website maintenance project: manually correcting about 900 broken links for old bibliography items (and quite a few not-so-old ones too). I have been chipping away at this chore in tedious little batches, once or twice per week since last August. This is a perfect example of how it takes an almost unbelievable amount of TLC to keep a website like this not only running smoothly, but in good condition.

I have been collecting references for about twenty years now — see the bibliography homepage — and almost every item from the first few years had moved or vanished. Decade-old URLs seem to have about a 20% chance of still being valid. Big publishers in particular — like the medical journal publishers — seem to change their URL scheme more often than I change my socks. I’m sure many of the links I fixed already need to be fixed again!

PainSci Member Login » Submit your email to unlock member content. If you can’t remember/access your registration email, please contact me. ~ Paul Ingraham, PainSci Publisher