Back to the past: on the shoulders of an academic search engine giant

TL;DR

This paper investigates the increasing trend of citing older articles over the past two decades, using alternative data sources and metrics, and suggests that search engine biases may influence this phenomenon.

Contribution

It provides a complementary analysis confirming the trend of citing older articles and explores potential causes, including search engine biases, using diverse data and categories.

Findings

Confirmed increase in citations to older articles from multiple data sources.

Suggests Google Scholar's ranking may influence citing patterns.

Highlights the need to understand search engine effects on scholarly citations.

Abstract

A study released by the Google Scholar team found an apparently increasing fraction of citations to old articles from studies published in the last 24 years (1990-2013). To demonstrate this finding we conducted a complementary study using a different data source (Journal Citation Reports), metric (aggregate cited half-life), time spam (2003-2013), and set of categories (53 Social Science subject categories and 167 Science subject categories). Although the results obtained confirm and reinforce the previous findings, the possible causes of this phenomenon keep unclear. We finally hypothesize that first page results syndrome in conjunction with the fact that Google Scholar favours the most cited documents are suggesting the growing trend of citing old documents is partly caused by Google Scholar.