Long‐term variations in the aging of scientific literature: From exponential growth to steady‐state science (1900–2004)

Larivière, Vincent; Archambault, Éric; Gingras, Yves

doi:10.1002/asi.20744

Cited by 127 publications

(128 citation statements)

References 22 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

110

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…The decreasing mean of the time to peak indicates that in recent times papers are taking less time to reach the peak of their attention. This result seems to be consistent with previous findings (Egghe, 2010;Larivière et al, 2008) showing, both theoretically and empirically, that the average reference age is an increasing function of time. This would suggest that more recent papers are able to dig deeper in scientific literature, reducing the amount of attention available for papers published in recent years and therefore causing a shortening of the time needed to peak.…”

Section: Evolution Of the Time To Peaksupporting

confidence: 93%

Attention decay in science

Parolo

Pan

Ghosh

et al. 2015

Journal of Informetrics

115

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The exponential growth in the number of scientific papers makes it increasingly difficult for researchers to keep track of all the publications relevant to their work. Consequently, the attention that can be devoted to individual papers, measured by their citation counts, is bound to decay rapidly. In this work we make a thorough study of the life-cycle of papers in different disciplines. Typically, the citation rate of a paper increases up to a few years after its publication, reaches a peak and then decreases rapidly. This decay can be described by an exponential or a power law behavior, as in ultradiffusive processes, with exponential fitting better than power law for the majority of cases. The decay is also becoming faster over the years, signaling that nowadays papers are forgotten more quickly. However, when time is counted in terms of the number of published papers, the rate of decay of citations is fairly independent of the period considered. This indicates that the attention of scholars depends on the number of published items, and not on real time.

show abstract

Section: Evolution Of the Time To Peaksupporting

confidence: 93%

Attention decay in science

Parolo

Pan

Ghosh

et al. 2015

Journal of Informetrics

115

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…JIFs can avoid citing article publication delays if it is accepted that the average impact of a journal is an appropriate proxy for the impact of its articles (but see: Lozano, Larivière, & Gingras, 2012; and note also the time dimension: Larivière, Archambault, & Gingras, 2008) 1 Thelwall, M. (in press). Are Mendeley reader counts high enough for research evaluations when articles are published?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are Mendeley reader counts high enough for research evaluations when articles are published?

Thelwall

2017

AJIM

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Design/methodology/approach -Average Mendeley reader counts were compared to average Scopus citation counts for 104520 articles from ten disciplines during the second half of 2016. Findings -Articles attracted, on average, between 0.1 and 0.8 Mendeley readers per article in the month in which they first appeared in Scopus. This is about ten times more than the average Scopus citation count. Research limitations/implications -Other subjects may use Mendeley more or less than the ten investigated here. The results are dependent on Scopus's indexing practices, and Mendeley reader counts can be manipulated and have national and seniority biases. Practical implications -Mendeley reader counts during the month of publication are more powerful than Scopus citations for comparing the average impacts of groups of documents but are not high enough to differentiate between the impacts of typical individual articles. Originality/value -This is the first multi-disciplinary and systematic analysis of Mendeley reader counts from the publication month of an article. IntroductionAcademic research is evaluated for appointment, promotion, tenure, for university league tables, for national research evaluation exercises and for self-reflection purposes. Some of these use quantitative data or are supported by numerical evidence of impact. Citation counts to refereed journal articles are a common source of this quantitative data, including in the form of Journal Impact Factors (JIFs) and field normalised citation counts (Garfield, 2006;Waltman, van Eck, van Leeuwen, Visser, & van Raan, 2011;Wilsdon, et al., 2015). Citation counts are not suitable for helping to evaluate new research because articles may take three years to attract a substantial number of citations due to publication delays. For this reason, formal evaluations often use a citation window of considerable length, such as three years (Wang, 2013), which excludes newer articles from evaluations. This means that the most recent and, therefore, most relevant research cannot be evaluated with the help of most citation-based indicators because they cannot differentiate effectively between different levels of impact for individual articles.Two solutions to this problem are to use publishing journal JIFs (or journal rankings: Kulczycki, 2017) as a proxy for citation impact or to use web-based early impact indicators. JIFs can avoid citing article publication delays if it is accepted that the average impact of a journal is an appropriate proxy for the impact of its articles (but see: Lozano, Larivière, & Gingras, 2012; and note also the time dimension: Larivière, Archambault, & Gingras, 2008) 1 Thelwall, M. (in press). Are Mendeley reader counts high enough for research evaluations when articles are published? Aslib Journal of Information Management, 69(2).

show abstract

“…In the past, this was stable at ten references per paper (Price 1963), but it is widely assumed this number has since increased. Larivière et al (2008) have shown that while the growth of publications in medical fields and in natural sciences & engineering is progressively slowing down since 1980 the number of references has not leveled off, which would indicate a growth in the number of references per paper. A paper that itself contains many references to previous work is likely to develop a stronger standing than a paper with no or few references (Latour 1987;Latour and Woolgar 1986).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What a difference a colon makes: how superficial factors influence subsequent citation

2013

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Getting cited is important for scholars and for the institutions in which they work. Whether because of the influence on scientific progress or because of the reputation of scholars and their institutions, understanding why some articles are cited more often than others can help scholars write more highly cited articles. This article builds upon earlier literature which identifies seemingly superficial factors that influence the citation rate of articles. Three Journal Citation Report subject categories are analyzed to identify these effects. From a set of 2,016 articles in Sociology, 6,957 articles in General & Internal Medicine, and 23,676 articles in Applied Physics, metadata from the Web of Knowledge was downloaded in addition to PDFs of the full articles. In this article number of words in title, number of pages, number of references, sentences in the abstract, sentences in the paper, number of authors and readability were identified as factors for analysis.

show abstract

Long‐term variations in the aging of scientific literature: From exponential growth to steady‐state science (1900–2004)

Cited by 127 publications

References 22 publications

Attention decay in science

Attention decay in science

Are Mendeley reader counts high enough for research evaluations when articles are published?

What a difference a colon makes: how superficial factors influence subsequent citation

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About