The ‘Half‐life’ of Periodical Literature: Apparent and Real Obsolescence

Abstract

The expression ‘half‐life’, borrowed from physics, has appeared quite frequently in the literature on documentation since 1960, when an article by Burton and Kebler on The ‘half‐life’ of some scientific and technical literatures was published, although it had certainly been used previously. Burton and Kebler point out that literature becomes obsolescent rather than disintegrating (as in its original meaning), so that ‘half‐life’ means ‘half the active life’, and this is commonly understood as meaning the time during which one‐half of the currently active literature was published. Numerous studies have been carried out, mainly by the analysis of citations, to establish obsolescence rates of the literature of different subjects. Bourne points out that different studies have given widely different results, so that many of the ‘half‐life’ figures reported are not valid beyond the particular sample of literature or users surveyed; certainly they cannot be used as accurate measures for discriminating between different subject‐fields.

How old is the Web? Characterizing the age and the currency of the European scientific Web

“…NIELSEN [2007] points to this same fact in the growth of the Web, where the growth follow a power law increase in the initial years and them an exponential growth in the mature years of the Web. Exponential distributions are usual in scientometrics studies as scientific literature obsolescence [LINE, 1970;1993] and e-journal usage along the time [NICHOLAS & AL., 2005]. Although some papers have shown similar singularities in the fit of these distributions [EGGHE & RAVICHANDRA, 1992;BURRELL, 2002].…”

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

“…Many years ago, it was suggested that given the accelerated pace of scientific development, scientific literature becomes more rapidly obsolete (Line 1970(Line , 1993Price, 1963Price, , 1965. Along those lines, the widespread use in some fields of open-access and e-print servers such as arXiv provides scientists with more rapid access to new research.…”

Multivariate approach to classify research institutes according to their outputs: The case of the CSIC's institutes

“…Thus, applied sciences create patents which contain detailed description of inventions, while the humanities need books which permit the expression of textual criticism and speculative and discursive reasoning. Disciplines with a rapid obsolescence tend to use fast communication media such as the proceeding papers (Line, 1970). This involves assessing the scientific research according to multiple output indicators which express the different activities of each research discipline (Martin, 1996).…”