Editor’s Note

This special issue on neutrality and nonalignment in world politics during the Cold War is a prelude to a book I am coediting with Aryo Makko (one of the contributors here) and Peter Ruggenthaler on relations between European neutral states and the Soviet Union after World War II. The book, which will appear in Harvard’s Cold War Studies Book Series in late 2017, will build on and supplement the articles published here.

In an editor’s note several years ago, I discussed the problems that arise with citations to online resources. Since then, I have noticed that an increasing number of prominent academic journals are allowing most or all footnotes to refer to online locations, often with nothing more than a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) provided. The same is true of some important government documents, such as U.S. Supreme Court opinions, which in recent years have adduced sources solely by providing a URL. This practice is regrettable for numerous reasons. The failure to provide any additional information about the item cited beyond a URL leaves no margin for error. If the link is broken, readers will have no way to check what the author is citing. How often do links malfunction? A study done by researchers at Harvard Law School in 2014 indicated that 70 percent of URL citations in law journals published from 1999 to 2011 no longer worked. The same study found that 50 percent of URLs in U.S. Supreme Court opinions no longer linked to the material cited. Two subsequent studies by informatics firms found that more than 50 percent of links in scientific and engineering journals, including the most cited journals, were no longer working after a decade. In one such journal, nearly 90 percent of URLs were no longer functional a decade later. What this means is that in a large and growing percentage of cases, readers of academic articles will find it difficult or impossible to verify the author’s sources soon after publication, thus undermining one of the most hallowed tenets of sound scholarship; namely, that it be reproducible.

Many examples relevant to literature on the Cold War could be provided here, but let me focus on two. An exceptionally useful repository was established in 1999 at the initiative of Vojtech Mastny consisting of vast quantities of declassified Warsaw Pact documents from all the countries of the former Soviet bloc, large collections of declassified materials from member-states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and compilations of oral histories of former Warsaw Pact and NATO military commanders. Known initially as the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact (PHP), the online repository was set up in partnership with the National Security Archive and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Several years later, the PHP was transferred to the jurisdiction of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology–Zurich (ETH Zurich) and renamed the Parallel History Project on Cooperative Security. The PHP, still under Mastny’s leadership, continued to perform the same functions and to collect and post immense collections of declassified documents, but the online repository was shifted to ETH Zurich’s server (http://www.php.isn.ethz.ch/). All the previous links to the PHP’s initial server no longer worked, and articles citing only those links had all their references become obsolete overnight. The PHP ceased to operate in 2011, but fortunately ETH Zurich has maintained the repository on its website. One can imagine, however, that at some point—perhaps a decade from now—the PHP online repository will be shifted to a different URL or perhaps will cease to exist altogether. This is all the more reason that scholars should cite relevant documents by title (if available) or by a brief description, by date, and by full archival location, along with a reference to the PHP’s URL. That way, even if the PHP collection disappears from the Internet in the future, readers will be able to track down and verify the cited sources through other means.

Another such example is the electronic reading room of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The CIA, like numerous other...