Long-term variations in the aging of scientific literature:: From exponential growth to steady-state science (1900-2004)
Long-term variations in the aging of scientific literature:: From exponential growth to steady-state science (1900-2004)
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DOI：
10.1002/asi.20744
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发表时间：
2008-01-15
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Gingras, Yves
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Lariviere, Vincent;Archambault, Eric;Gingras, Yves
尽管有大量关于科学文献老化和过时的研究，但在很长一段时间内，还没有研究衡量科学文献过时的速度的变化。本文研究了老化现象的演变，特别是被引用文献的时代是如何在100多年的科学活动中发生变化的。它表明，被引用文献的平均年龄和中位年龄在这一时期经历了几次变化。具体地说，第一次世界大战和第二次世界大战都显著增加了被引用文学的年代。本文的主要发现是，与普遍认为的相反，自20世纪60年代中期以来，被引用材料的时代不断上升。换句话说，在那段时间里，研究人员依赖的是越来越陈旧的文献。我们的数据表明，这种现象是对现代科学指数增长之后的稳态动态的直接反应；然而，我们也观察到，在线预印档案，如arxiv，在某些子领域产生了相反的效果。
Despite a very large number of studies on the aging and obsolescence of scientific literature, no study has yet measured, over a very long time period, the changes in the rates at which scientific literature becomes obsolete. This article studies the evolution of the aging phenomenon and, in particular, how the age of cited literature has changed over more than 100 years of scientific activity. It shows that the average and median ages of cited literature have undergone several changes over the period. Specifically, both World War I and World War II had the effect of significantly increasing the age of the cited literature. The major finding of this article is that contrary to a widely held belief, the age of cited material has risen continuously since the mid-1960s. In other words, during that period, researchers were relying on an increasingly old body of literature. Our data suggest that this phenomenon is a direct response to the steady-state dynamics of modern science that followed its exponential growth; however, we also have observed that online preprint archives such as arXiv have had the opposite effect in some subfields.