What exactly is a permalink?
Links are the primary way we navigate the internet. With just a simple string of characters I can point you to specific resource on another server that I think you should check out for one reason or another. This can be incredibly useful for citations, in which researchers want to include many articles worth of knowledge to support their claims, but cannot fit all that text within their own article. These get included at the end of the article, in the References section, and historically they would have included metadata to allow someone to go find a physical resource in a library. In the digital age it is now common and expected to digitally link to the location of the resource on the internet. It is vital that the link placed in the references stays stable and resolveable, because once published scientific papers usually aren’t edited unless there is a necessary revision or retraction. So, what defines these “permalinks”, and are they really as stable as we think?