Unraveling the dynamics of growth, aging and inflation for citations to scientific articles from specific research fields

TL;DR

This study investigates how citations to scientific articles evolve over time across different physics journals, revealing field-specific patterns in growth and aging that influence citation dynamics and knowledge dissemination.

Contribution

It introduces a normalization method for citation rates, separating growth and aging effects, and compares these dynamics across scientific fields and patents to uncover underlying principles.

Findings

Citation rates are separable into growth and aging functions.

Field-specific differences influence citation intensity and knowledge flow.

Comparison with patents offers insights into information propagation.

Abstract

We analyze the time evolution of citations acquired by articles from journals of the American Physical Society (PRA, PRB, PRC, PRD, PRE and PRL). The observed change over time in the number of papers published in each journal is considered an exogenously caused variation in citability that is accounted for by a normalization. The appropriately inflation-adjusted citation rates are found to be separable into a preferential-attachment-type growth kernel and a purely obsolescence-related (i.e., monotonously decreasing as a function of time since publication) aging function. Variations in the empirically extracted parameters of the growth kernels and aging functions associated with different journals point to research-field-specific characteristics of citation intensity and knowledge flow. Comparison with analogous results for the citation dynamics of technology-disaggregated cohorts of patents provides deeper insight into the basic principles of information propagation as indicated by citing behavior.