Knowledge Management

A scoping review mapping everything published on digital hoarding since the concept was first named in 2015 finds a young, fragmented field: only 36 qualifying studies, most small, with no agreed definition or validated measurement scale.

Persistent identifiers were built to keep the chain of citation intact, and they have done half the job: a DOI keeps the name alive, not the thing it names. When Crossref checked 7.4 million articles against the major scholarly archives, 27.64% appeared to be preserved nowhere. The failure is not evenly spread, and it concentrates on the small publishers most likely to close. That matters beyond librarianship, because the layer we routinely check when a reference looks suspicious is the name, which is the layer that persists, and a source nobody can retrieve is a source whose genuine and fabricated versions look identical from the reader's side.