time distribution citations

[Steven A. Morris]

Dear Manuel,

I think there are quite a few studies on literature aging out there already.
 Do you have some hypothesis about an underlying model of citation aging
that you're trying to test?  That would be interesting to discuss.

My own feeling is that you'll need to divide the references you study into
two groups, "highly cited" and "normal" references.

"Highly cited" would correspond to "concept symbols" as defined by Small,
and could also be thought of as "exemplar references" for the specialty's
paradigm. They may have citation rates that are fairly constant for long
periods.  (The literature equivalent of what "punctuated equilibria" is for
biological evolution).

"Normal references" are probably background noise, subject to predictable
statistical distributions and aging.

We've all read about preferential attachment models of citation networks,
like the Barabasi-Albert model.  Many of these models incorporate an initial
"attractiveness" as well a "success breeds success" attractiveness of
references to citations. I think it would be very interesting to attempt to
measure this total (initial plus SBS) attractiveness as a function of time.
 I don't recall seeing empirical studies like this, though I recall one
paper by a coworker of Barabasi (Jeung, "Measuring preferential attachment
for evolving networks").

For a study like that my own inclination would be to stick to well-focused
collections of papers covering specific specialties, rather than try to
study  some other huge heterogeneous collection of papers.

Hope this helps.

S. Morris

On Tue, 6 Apr 2004 09:12:34 +0200, Manuel Lopez Estornell
<lopez_manest at GVA.ES> wrote:

>Dear colleagues:
>
>I am currently working on time distribution of citations after the
publication of  papers in scientific journals, it is,  1) the lag between
publication and first citations and
>2) the average frecuency of citations (in %) during the t+1, t+2...t+n
years after the publication of papers.
>
>Please, may you give me your opinion about this issue?.
>
>Thank you very much in advance.
>
>Best regards
>
>Manuel Lopez-Estornell
> Advisor Council on S&T
>Regional Government of Valencia
>Juristas, 10
>46001-Valencia
>
>lopez_manest at gva.es
>