A new post on the Scholarly Kitchen discusses the trend for citing older papers. Focussing on the cited half-life of journals (‘the median age of articles cited in a given journal for a given year’) instead of individual citations, the author explains that increasing half-lives are observed in 91% of subject categories. In addition, there is a tendency for cited half-life to increase along with the total number of citations a journal receives, so when a journal’s articles are cited more frequently, the proportion of those citations referring to older articles also increases. Interestingly, journals in Chemistry and Engineering appear to be ‘bucking the overall trend’; the author does not attempt to explain this fact, but invites readers to speculate on the causes.
Explanations for the general trend to cite older papers vary. The rise of digital publishing and improvements in search technologies that enable readers to find, retrieve and cite older scholarly articles so easily must play their part, but, as the author explains, the trend to cite older publications is itself older than both the internet and digital publishing. The author also suggests that changes in the funding of science may be significant, with ‘a gradual move to fund incremental and applied research’ possibly resulting in the publication of ‘fewer fundamental and theoretical studies’ and thus the need for authors to cite older literature to acknowledge such foundational studies. In an earlier post by the same author and the comments it generated, other explanations are suggested and discussed: http://bit.ly/1LtI0rj. These include a twenty-first-century ‘crisis in authority’ that drives authors to older works; an increasing tendency to include more history in describing the context of research; a smaller growth in the number of scientific publications than in the number of researchers using these publications, inspiring authors to consult older articles; and the fact that many journals with paywalls on recent articles provide open access for older papers, rendering them easier and more affordable to use.
Whatever the reasons behind the trend to cite older scholarship may be, it is encouraging to think that the research and writing requiring such a large investment of personal and institutional resources can, even in an age so focussed on instant publication and access, look forward to not just a long, but also an increasingly useful life.
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