Encoding the citation life-cycle: the operationalization of a literature-aging conceptual model

Abstract

In this study, we introduce a new literature-aging conceptual model (Bailón-Moreno, 2005) to study citation curve and to discuss its implications. First, we improve the conceptual model by adding a period to describe the "death" of citations. Second, we offer a feasible operationalization for this conceptual model and implement a set of cross-discipline publications in the Web of Science to test its performance. Furthermore, we propose two measurements according to the new model-SP and RP-to capture the patterns of citation curve of publications. For example, we find that half papers in Arts & Humanities published in 1985 almost receive no or extremely few citations in the first five years after their publication; on average, those papers in Arts & Humanities have a five-years-long period when their citations grow rapidly. In addition, we observe a special phenomenon named "literature revival" as some publications may have multiple citation life cycles, which received little attention from current researches. Finally, we discuss the implications of our study, especially the application of the SP and RP in improving scientific evaluation and collection development in library, and the inspiration of "literature revival".

Can the principle of the ‘right to be forgotten’ be applied to academic publishing? Probe from the perspective of personal rights, archival science, open science and post‐publication peer review

“…Sartor (2016) argues that the validity of RTBF depends on ‘gains’ to society or the public versus personal gains over time, making one argument for the validity of RTBF in the light of a decrease in information's ‘positive balance’, referring to information's usefulness and relevance, over time, arguing that some data, like ‘the individual's emergency contact details, previous addresses, death‐in‐service beneficiary details or health information’ can be deleted because ‘they are no longer needed’ (p. 79), applying the same argument to security camera footage. In academic publishing, one could consider the fading relevance of a technology as it becomes replaced with newer technology, and a drop in citations over time cold serve as a proxy variable to appreciate that decrease in relevance (Gou et al, 2022). Sartor (2016) makes a separate argument for the validity of RTBF in the light of an increase (or resurgence) in information's ‘positive balance’; that is, it may have lost relevance but regained relevance years later.…”