This study focuses on six leading communication journals and their use of online citations in articles published between 2000 and 2003. The study uses content analysis to explore if there is a relationship between citation characteristics and their stability. The findings show that online citations in the .gov and .org domains are more likely to remain accessible over time. Year of publication and URL level also emerged as significant predictors of online citation permanence. More than 37 percent of the online citations have disappeared from the original source over a four-year period (2000-2003). The implications of these findings are discussed in the context of reliability and replicability of scholarship.