About
Link rot isn't a hypothetical problem — it's a measurable one.
Multiple studies of legal, academic, and journalistic corpora have found that a meaningful fraction of cited URLs fail to resolve within years of publication. Zittrain, Albert, and Lessig's frequently-cited Harvard study put the figure for Supreme Court citations at roughly half within six years.¹
DataTools exists to make checking, recovering, and re-citing rotted links a five-minute task instead of a half-day chore. The first tool — the URL Checker — verifies arbitrary URLs, DOIs, and arXiv IDs in batches and pairs every failing entry with a Wayback Machine snapshot lookup.
Everything runs as a stateless server function: nothing about your input is stored, logged, or forwarded to third parties. There are no accounts and no usage limits beyond a sensible per-batch cap.
More tools are queued — see the toolkit index. If you'd like to suggest one or report a bug, find us on the channels in the footer.
- ¹ Zittrain, J., Albert, K., & Lessig, L. (2014). Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations. dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/12686942