Growing Impact of Older Articles

[Éric Archambault]

This paper doesn't present much we didn't already know and in facts omits known explanations.

My colleagues Vincent Larivière, Yves Gingras and I suggested several years ago that this phenomenon was due to the fact that the scientific literature is not growing as fast as the growth of researchers using this literature and since researchers have plenty of time to "digest" what is being produced now, they are increasingly citing older articles.

http://science-metrix.com/en/publications/scientific-publications#/en/publications/scientific-papers/the-decline-in-the-concentration-of-citations-1900-2007


This was confirmed mathematically by Leo Egghe:

"This paper proves two regularities that were found in the paper [V. Larivière, E. Archambault and Y. Gingras (2007).
Long-term patterns in the aging of the scientific literature, 1900-2004. Proceedings of ISSI 2007. CSIC, Madrid, Spain, 449-456, 2007].
The first is that the mean as well as the median reference age increases in time. The second is that the Price Index decreases in time.

Using an exponential literature growth model we prove both regularities. Hence we show that
the two results do not have a special informetric reason but that they are just a mathematical
consequence of a widely accepted simple literature growth model."

https://doclib.uhasselt.be/dspace/bitstream/1942/9283/2/showing%202.pdf


Eric



-----Original Message-----
From: ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Metrics [mailto:SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU] On Behalf Of Philip Davis
Sent: November-10-14 4:09 PM
To: SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU
Subject: [SIGMETRICS] Growing Impact of Older Articles


A recent study by Google employees reveals a growth in the proportion of citations to older articles. While digital publishing, mass digitization, full text indexing and better search engines may provide some explanation, the trend started decades ago. Something much bigger is taking place.

see:
http://wp.me/pcvbl-aey