If a web address vanished from your publication's description after you saved, it was removed on purpose. Every publication description is cleaned of links pointing off UNI at the moment it is saved, on the first save and on every edit after it. Nothing you did caused it and retyping the link will not make it stick.
What is removed, exactly
- A link to any site other than uni.xyz loses its link. The words you linked stay and read as ordinary text. The address behind them is gone.
- A web address typed out as text is deleted outright. Anything beginning
http://,https://orwww.is removed along with its text, so the sentence closes over the gap. - Email and phone links lose their link. An address written as a
mailto:link, or a number written as atel:link, keeps its visible text and loses the link.
What survives
- Links to uni.xyz and its subdomains. They stay as working links, so pointing at your own project, journal or profile on UNI is fine.
- An email address typed as plain text. Only linked addresses are touched, so
name@example.comwritten into a sentence is left alone. - Everything outside the description. The title is not cleaned, and neither is the PDF.
Runs of spaces left behind by a removed address are collapsed to one. That is why a description can read oddly after a save rather than obviously broken, so read it back once after editing.
Why the rule has no exceptions
A description is one of the few free-text fields on UNI that anyone can write and everyone can read, which makes it the first place link spam and paid-placement schemes go. Stripping every off-site address is the rule that works without someone judging which link is genuine, so a real citation and an advert are treated the same way. The same cleaning runs on your profile bio and about section, on work experience summaries, and on comments across UNI.
Where to put a source instead
Put citations and further reading inside the PDF itself, where nothing is stripped and where a reader looking for them will expect to find them. If the destination is on UNI, link it in the description as normal. If it is not, name the source in words, for example the publisher and title, and let the reader search for it.