The Life Cycle of Scholarly Articles Across Fields of Research

Abstract

This short note records an unusual situation with some Google Scholar's profiles that imply the existence of "supernovae" articles, i.e., articles whose impact -in terms of number of citations -in a single year gets (almost) an order of magnitude higher than the previous year and immediate drops (and remains steady) to a very low level after the next year. We analyse the issue and resolve the situation providing an answer whether there exist supernovae articles.

Topics and Geographical Diffusion of Knowledge in Top Economic Journals

“…The diffusion path is therefore dependent upon the time lag between the citing and the cited papers and the outcome is the combination of the diffusion and obsolescence process. We expect that the citation probability first rises and then falls with elapsed time and this paper also provides an attempt to estimate exactly the citation lag distribution (Anauati, Galiani, and Gálvez 2016;Galiani and Gálvez 2017). In doing so, it is also necessary to take into account that the propensity to publish and the propensity to cite vary over time and space.…”

“…The general results are the growing importance of empirical vis-à-vis theoretical work concerning most of the different fields within economics. In addition even if scientific knowledge is typically treated as codified knowledge that diffuses quickly in the global network of scientists, excellence in economics remains highly concentrated and there is scant evidence on the rate of geographical diffusion of different fields in economics (Anauati, Galiani, andGálvez 2016, 2018;Galiani and Gálvez 2017;Hargreaves Heap and Parikh 2005).…”

“…This paper contributes to the growing body of literature that quantitatively analyzes the rate of diffusion and obsolescence of different fields in the economic discipline looking at the papers' characteristics and their citation performance (Anauati, Galiani, andGálvez 2016, 2018;Angrist et al 2017;Galiani and Gálvez 2017). We estimate precisely, using a quasi-structural model, the life cycle of the papers taking into account their topic, and the geographical origin and cohort of both citing and cited papers.…”

Venue Analytics: A Simple Alternative to Citation-Based Metrics

“…Further, we also develop a system for automatic organization of venues. This is motivated by the desire for an open, reproducible, and objective metric that is not subject to some of the challenges inherent to citation-based methods [10,15,22].…”

“…For one, citation behavior varies widely by fields [10]. Additionally, citations often exhibits non-trivial temporal behavior [22], which also varies greatly by sub-field. These issues highly affect one's ability to compare across disciplines and produce different scores at different times.…”