The relationship between journal productivity and obsolescence

Abstract

This study examined the relationship between journal productivity and journal obsolescence for a database of references from articles dealing with desalination. Although these two variables have often been studied in isolation, no previous studies have examined their interaction within a single subject literature. It was hypothesized that those journals that were most productive would, on the average, have relatively short active lives, and that as journal productivity decreased, the average active lives of the articles contributed by a journal would increase. The number of references to a particular journal in the database was used as a measure of that journal's productivity. The measure of obsolescence used was the median age of the references to a particular journal. The hypothesized inverse linear relationship was not found to hold, although the data did exhibit an inverse tendency. It was found that highly productive journals did tend to have low journal median citation ages, and that high journal median citation ages were always associated with journals that were unproductive in terms of the numbers of references to those journals in the database. These extreme cases appeared to be distributed in a hyperbolic manner. The remaining journals, which were not highly productive and did not have high journal median citation ages, appeared to be distributed in a random manner.

An analysis and comparison of scientometric data between journals of physics, chemistry and engineering

“…They observed that as thermoluminescent dosimetry literature grew it became increasingly scattered in terms of the number of contributing journals and that the rate, in terms of median citation age, of obsolescence decrease. WALLACE [1985] examined the relationship between journal productivity and journal obsolescence. After conducting a statistical test, he found that "highly productive journals did tend to have low journal median citation ages, and that high journal median citation ages were always associated with journals that were unproductive in terms of the number of references to those journals in the database."…”

The research core of the knowledge management literature

“…Bradford's Law has been extensively explored by Fairthorne (1969), Brookes (1977), Leimkuhler (1980), Wallace (1986), Nicolaisen and Hjorland (2007), and others. Drott (1981) commented specifically on the generality of the application of Bradford's Law to scientific literatures:…”

Citation characterization and impact normalization in bioinformatics journals

“…Article life span is represented by the obsolescence indicator such as cited-half-life (Avramescu, 1979;Egghe & Rousseau, 2000a, 2000bLarivière, Archambault, & Gingras, 2008;Nicholas et al, 2005;Tona & Al, 2006;Tsay, 1998;Wallace, 1986). The normalization of citation frequency over the course of time is necessary (Kuo & Rupe, 2007;Yu, Yang, & Liang, 2010), especially for journals in modern fields of science with short article life spans, such as biology.…”