Accelerating the citation cycle

[Stevan Harnad]

On Wed, 28 Feb 2001, Greg Kuperberg wrote:

> I believe that accelerated,
> stable citation is the single biggest strength of the arXiv over the
> alternatives.

For data on this, see the following:

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/Digitometrics/img009.gif

    This shows the shorter and shorter time until the first (and last,
    for all but the high impact papers) citation peak is reached:

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/Digitometrics/img011.gif

    This shows the usual publication lag, and the cross-over in the
    version cited (from the preprint to the postprint):


More data are available at:

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/Digitometrics/index.htm

http://opcit.eprints.org/tdb198/opcit/

and

http://opcit.eprints.org/ijh198/

For the record, I do not share Greg's opinion that this effect, splendid
though it is, is anywhere NEAR being self-archiving's greatest
strength. There are much bigger and benefits:

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/science.htm

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