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.

Capítulo 1: A bibliometria e a avaliação da produção científica

“…Some authors have downright considered growth and obsolescence inverse functions, the faster growth of literature in a field, the faster it ages and the literature becomes obsolete in a shorter time (Brookes, 1970, Egghe, 1993, Kärki and Kortelainen, 1998. Consequently, an exponential model has been proposed for the ageing of literature in the beginning, too (Wallace, 1986. In particular, the model of radioactive decay has been adopted.…”

“…First Wallace (1986) has studied ageing of scientific literature. In particular, he analysed, the relationship between journal productivity and obsolescence, and assumed an exponential distribution.…”

A noninformetric analysis of the relationship between citation age and journal productivity

“…But before we do this, the next section is devoted to an apparent informetric problem raised by Wallace (1986). Wallace writes literally (p. 137): “For a given subject literature, the median citation ages of the journals contributing to that literature will vary inversely with the productivity of thoses journals, where productivity is measured in terms of the number of articles contributed by each journal.” If this is true, it would be a remarkable informetric result, useable in many other applications.…”

“… Abstract A problem, raised by Wallace (JASIS, 37, 136–145, 1986), on the relation between the journal's median citation age and its number of articles is studied. Leaving open the problem as such, we give a statistical explanation of this relationship, when replacing “median” by “mean” in Wallace's problem.…”

The information analyst as a quality filter in the scientific communication process

“…Third, research has found that numbers of citations in core journals do not always correlate with quality papers [3,4,14,28,36]. Fourth, the development of an automated quality filtering device involves the use of so many variables that application in an information retrieval situation is essentially impractical.…”