FW: Old articles live on ...

[Garfield, Eugene]

 I think members of SIGMETRICS listserv will be interested in the posting of
Dana Roth and my response. Best wishes. EG




-----Original Message-----
From: Garfield, Eugene
Sent: Sunday, January 12, 2003 3:29 PM
To: 'CHEMICAL INFORMATION SOURCES DISCUSSION LIST'
Subject: RE: Old articles live on ...


Dana: All of this is quite interesting and belies the oft expressed view of
self-styled experts who claim that no self-respecting physicist would be
citing literature that is older than five years. In any case this will open
possibilities for many interesting studies. One future study should
determine whether all these new readerships affect citation of the older
literature.

The ease of access to the older literature might also increase the accuracy
of citations to that literature since we know that there is a lot of
bibliographic borrowing in lieu of having access to the originals.

I would remind our colleagues that there is a statistical report in each
annual issue of the printed SCI which gives the distribution of citations to
each year of the literature. I don't know whether these Guides are supplied
to subscribers to the electronic versions. Best wishes.

Eugene Garfield, PhD. email garfield at codex.cis.upenn.edu
tel 215-243-2205   fax 215-387-1266
President, The Scientist   www.the-scientist.com
Chairman Emeritus, ISI  www.isinet.com
home page: www.eugenegarfield.org
Past President, American Society for Information Science and Technology
(ASIS&T)  www.asis.org





-----Original Message-----
From: dzrlib at LIBRARY.CALTECH.EDU [mailto:dzrlib at LIBRARY.CALTECH.EDU]
Sent: Friday, January 10, 2003 8:17 PM
To: CHMINF-L at LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU
Subject: FW: Old articles live on ...


This is taken from several recent SLA-PAM list-serv messages ...

Whereas in the past it often took a trip to the back stacks of a library
to find older material, today such access is just a click away

--------------

In looking at downloads from PROLA which contains Physical Review,
Physical Review Letters and Reviews of Modern Physics going back to 1893,
the journal downloads per article dropped from the current year back for
about four or five years and then leveled off to a plateau which seems to
go back indefinately at a fairly stable level.
There does not appear to be any year back to 1893 in which the number of
downloads is less than the two or three times the number of articles
published.

-------------------

Data shows that of over 350,000 different articles online on AIP's
OJPS system, over 175,000 different articles are downloaded each month.


Dana L. Roth
Millikan Library / Caltech 1-32
1200 E. California Blvd. Pasadena, CA 91125
626-395-6423  fax 626-792-7540
dzrlib at library.caltech.edu
http://library.caltech.edu/collections/chemistry.htm

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